Farsight

I can't give it, Severian. It would take me hours to look it all up from wikipedia or elsewhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertex_function ..and compose something that might stand a chance of passing muster. And even then I'd perhaps get something wrong and get laughed at. Maybe Albers could rattle something off. What can I offer instead? Oh, I'll probably still get the usual opprobium, but what the heck: take a look at the picture below: The anomalous magnetic moment is because it's looping, not spinning.

Semantics is not minor, someguy. It's really important when you're trying to analyse something with precision and understand it. Trust me on this. But since nobody has come up with any response to my precit of time... Time, in its barest essence, is a relative measure of motion. It’s an emergent property, a derived effect, and it exists like heat exists. But it’s only a dimension in the sense of measure. It isn't a dimension like the dimensions of space which offer freedom of movement. Clocks don’t run, days don’t pass, and time doesn’t flow. Time is not a length. You cannot travel in time, you can only travel in space, because time is merely a relative measure of motion against other motions through space, and you can’t travel through travel. ..and nobody can produce any evidence for time travel, I will presume that everybody here now accepts that time travel is absurd crackpot pseudoscience, and therefore agrees with TIME EXPLAINED. Round one to Farsight, methinks. So, moving on to energy: Energy, in its barest essence, is stress, quantified by volume. We see it in a spring and in a chemical bond, and in the end, it is a volume of stressed space. In empty space with nothing to hold it in place, a stress travels with the tension that always accompanies stress, like a ripple in a rubber sheet. We usually call it a photon. It is energy moving from one place in space, to another place in space. The energy you measure depends on your motion with respect to it, on how you are also moving from one place in space, to another place in space.

*********************************************************************************** Another excellent post, elas. There's some good quotes there. I'll follow them up offline, and contribute to your thread as best I can later. *********************************************************************************** Do you ever listen, Swanson? Here's what I said about a pion. And pray do please remember that I have never mention pions in any of my essays. So I answer a question that is not referenced in "Farsight's theories" and what comes next? Do I get any reference to TIME EXPLAINED or MASS EXPLAINED, or GRAVITY EXPLAINED? Oh no. Just more red-herrings, drilling down to minutae, along with a blinkered blunt dogmatic refusal to address the very work that is supposedly the subject of this thread. You want me to show you my response about multiple photons? Would you even notice it if I did?

And I DID discuss pions! I said what the products of neutral pion decay are, here. Weren't you listening? And we've been all over the place whilst studiously avoiding the content of my model which starts with time travel, because like BenTheMan's latest thread, this is merely a facile attempt to discredit the competition. You want predictions? Here's some predictions: 1) No evidence for time travel will ever be found. I make this prediction because my analysis indicates that time travel is a conceptual flaw that permits absurd impossible paradoxes and is not possible because my analysis exposes time is a derived effect of motion or travel, and you can't travel through travel. 2) No wormholes will ever be found or created where these wormholes permit time travel. See above for why. 3) All particles decay or can be annihilated, via one or more stages sometimes involving other introduced particles, to yield photons. 4) The Higgs Boson will never be discovered. 5) Magnetic monopoles will never be discovered. 6) Antigravity will be discovered. 7) We will never find any evidence for the actual existence of world lines. 8) We will never find any evidence for the actual existence of a block universe. I say this because I do have free will, and don't get all absurd on me saying I can't prove it. 9) No evidence for fundamental open or closed strings will ever be found. 10) No further dimensions above and beyond the known 3+1 dimensions will ever be found. 11) No Boltzman Brains will ever be found, because these predictions are quackpot pseudoscience garbage with as much reality as Boltzman TURDS. What would you rather believe? Absurd nonsense like Boltzman Brains that predicts something, but with a get-out clause that says they aren't very likely so we just need to wait longer? Or a feet-on-the-ground view that says we have NO evidence for this supposition and must therefore regard it as speculative pseudoscience? You're treating the common-sense view as pseudoscience and speculation because it doesn't predict absurdity! Absurd!

Someguy, thank you for staying on topic. And well done, I think you've got it. OK, we still don't quite see eye to eye. But note that in your first sentence you say "it is semantics". When people say things like "It's just semantics, it doesn't matter", what they ought to do is stop and think about what semantics actually means. It means meaning. And the meaning does matter. That's why I think the choice of words really really matters, and using the word "travel" to talk about time is so very mistaken. ui iThis is dismiss But let mWhen it comes to words like travel, woI have to say dimissing something that "just semantics" is saying the wrong thing. ********************************************************************** Sigh. I showed where Ben ran to the moderators on another forum. You gave me infraction points for abuse, but do nothing about the abuse directed at me. Captain says "no more abuse", so then when I report it, you still do nothing. Now you even let Ben start a thread dedicated to abusing me and do nothing about it, and you're chipping in with your own abuse. LOL, you are totally absurd! I think you ow me an apology, bud. ***************************************************************** Because they use the wrong concept. Time is a dimension in that it a measure. I hope we can all agree on that. But the 4-vector equations imply that time is a dimension in the sense of "freedom of movement". There is simply no evidence to support this. We cannot hop around in time like we can hop around in space. We cannot see any world lines, any time travel, or a block universe that debars freewill. Time machines are therefore reduced to crackpot pseudoscience. The 4-vector equations employ the very concept of time is a dimension that offers freedom of movement that I challenge in TIME EXPLAINED. They therefore fail as any kind of mathematical evidence against TIME EXPLAINED. Do you understand what I say about axioms? IThey are starting-point presumptions used in mathematics, and I simply cannot use mathematics to examine the axioms it employs. I am right about time you know. Sometime soon you'll get a frisson chill down your spine when you realise it. PS: I have to go. I'll respond to other points later. ****************************************************************************** Bloody well said, elas. I think the problem is that people so "believe" in mathematics, that even though it provides no real answers to many of the mysteries of physics, they simply cannot bring themselves to examine the axioms upon which the mathematics is built, and are hostile to anybody who attempts to do so. This Psychology of Belief aspect of human nature is something that we normally think is only exhibited by religious adherents. But actually, it's far more prevalent than people appreciate. ************************************************************************************* How about something more apt? Something like: "Absurd attempts to discredit Farsight's model without actually referring to it".

Well said, someguy. The problem with something like TIME EXPLAINED is that it shoots down the crackpot notions of time travel that permits absurd paradox, and the block universe that allows no free will. The reason why BenTheMan (a String Theorist, LOL!) will not discuss it and instead seeks to discredit me with silly abuse, isn't because TIME EXPLAINED is dreadfully wrong. It's because it's dreadfully right. Interestingly, Baez fails his own crackpot test.

insane alien: bah: all you quote is more of the blather we see here. Your first link is to overall RELATIVITY+ summary, and all you're saying is "no, that's wrong", without actually saying anything intelligent at all. And the other links show us Edtharan repeatedly saying "Farsight you're wrong because of <axiomatic statement such as time is the fourth dimension>". Thin gruel, kid. swansont: yes, I've said it's a toy model rather than a theory. I was quoting from the thread title. let me remind you what it is: Science-based criticisms of Farsight's Theories. You aren't trying to concentrate on anything other than ignoring the model I present, digging up all kinds of tangential red-herring questions, ignoring my answers, then digging up more questions. And you still refuse to consider the time travel and wormholes issue that brought us here, which I counter with TIME EXPLAINED. The situation remains that self-appointed so-called rational-minded "scientists" would rather believe in time travel than read an explanation of why it's not possible. And it really is quite, quite absurd. And to bolster your absurdity, you are inferring that I am a crackpot. I rather think there's another word that's more suitable: heretic. Elas: I read your paper, and noted the "stretched hoops" illustration. I'm afraid however I became somewhat confused by the way the text talked about electron shells and particles without what looked to me a clear separation. If you start some thread on it I'll give you some detailed feedback for what it's worth. I have read either this or something similar from you previously. That sounds sensible, someguy. OK, let's start with the first of my basic principles. Let's start with time: Time, in its barest essence, is a relative measure of motion. It’s an emergent property, a derived effect, and it exists like heat exists. But it’s only a dimension in the sense of measure. It isn't a dimension like the dimensions of space which offer freedom of movement. Clocks don’t run, days don’t pass, and time doesn’t flow. Time is not a length. You cannot travel in time, you can only travel in space, because time is merely a relative measure of motion against other motions through space, and you can’t travel through travel. Discuss.

Oh they've been analysed paragraph by paragraph have they? Would you like to show me the evidence for that? Because they haven't. And how many times have I asked people to do so on this thread? Would you like me to show you that evidence? I've answered lots of questions, but you ignore my replies, just as you ignore Farsight's "theories", which also answer questions. Now I've run out of patience. There you go. I do get blind faith here. I've never seen so much blind faith. And I don't think there is one. None? Hello, here we are on page 7. Bad at maths? Where did that come from? I said you can't use maths to tackle mathematical axioms. Ignore you? You really are making it up as you go along. Anybody can check the thread and see this. No, all I'm asking is that you actually read what I say. You continually ignore what I say, and soothe your conscience with dishonesty. Now that is an utterly ridiculous insult. You're the guys playing religion here. Not me. This thread is absurd. It is a Scientific criticism of farsight's theories that will not refer to those theories. It is utterly Kafkaesque, like a medieval theocratic court performing a burn the heretic show trial. It is the height of irrationality, and the pretence is shameful. No wonder this forum is a dead zone for juveniles.

Knowledgeable group? LOL. And they haven't pointed out any errors. They haven't even read my material. They won't read it, and yet there's this pretence of giving a science-based criticism of something they haven't read. It's totally absurd. And now we get this fiction that my ideas are crap because they can't stand up to the existing evidence? Really, it's comical. I'm sorry blike, but no.

Er, no you haven't shown me where it was wrong. All you've done is thrown up a pile of red herring irrelevant questions, claimed that my answers are unsatisfactory, and LOL, you still haven't actually read RELATIVITY+. Dow dow, dow de dow de de dowde dow: Un-be-liev-able.

Swanson: Apologies, I choose not to answer your questions above. Notwithstanding my Duracell Bunny remark earlier, I've decided I've given enough of my time here to people who feel quite so very rational and learn-ed that they are able to offer a "science based criticism" of my RELATIVITY+ model without actually reading it. This thread is simply one long insult rather what it pretends to be, and I now realise that I don't want to persuade you guys that I'm right. So please can you delete the recent threads I've posted that contain no meaningful responses. Again, like last time, it's been "fun", but there are things I need to do and this is not a productive use of my time.

Wrong. It takes force. No energy is used to keep a tetherball going round in a circle. There's tension on the string and a force, but no work is being done. Wrong. See above. So? Do you really expect the same number of photons as protons? There are lots of photons because it's the most fundamental entity. You brought up aether, not me. It was just another of your attempts to discredit my model without examining it rationally. I derive it. But I'm not telling you how. Important note to all: This represents a turning point for BenTheMan. This is where he starts saying that everything I've been saying is just String Theory, and before you know it String Theory is trying to claim RELATIVITY+ as its own. I have actually had people telling me that General Relativity is part of string theory. As the band EMF might say: Un-be-liev-able. I do understand time. You don't. It's that simple. And LOL. Very rational. You haven't actually read my stuff, but you think you can give a Science-based criticism of Farsight's Theories? Oh, you just have to laugh! Dow dow, dow de dow de de dowde dow: Un-be-liev-able. Come off it. Now you're wriggling to try and get off your own hook. My "theories" are given in the various essays, not in some single item you've plucked from them. Oh geddoutofit. You will declare any explanation I give to be unsatisfactory. Or you'll move the goalposts and ask me something else. I notice Lorentz Variance has disappeared off the list. Looks like I've knocked that old chestnut on the head then. And let me remind you: we were talking on the TIME TRAVEL AND WORMHOLES thread, you said time travel is possible, I said time travel is impossible, and could explain why. But we still haven't even touched TIME EXPLAINED, the first of "Farsight's Theories". So if you want to give us a rational, science-based criticism, be my guest: TIME EXPLAINED *********************************************************** It isn't easy. That's why you don't see many predictions in my essays. And note that the model examines axiomatic base concepts, and thence challenges interpretation of experiments like the Shapiro Time Delay, not the results. That means I wouldn't predict any different results. There's a darn sight more scientific thought in my model than in the "science-based criticisms" on this thread. And besides, what are you going to tell me? We can travel in time because you've done the maths? When your axiomatic concept of time is plumb wrong? And therefore you don't need to even read TIME EXPLAINED, let alone some rational thought to it. Jeez. Lucky for you that I'm the Duracell Bunny eh? ************************************************************ Wrong. Things move through space. That's what we see. That's what we have evidence of. We have no evidence things move through time. It is a presumption, an axiom, and you "proof" employs circular reasoning. Sorry, work calls, so I have to cut this short, but in essence: A photon is energy.

elas: I don't think you'll get very far with it here. People will read as far as something they don't like, then spend forever afterwards calling you names. I'm sorry I haven't responded to the stuff you've posted, I am interested, and I will give some sincere feedback. But I'm run off my feet at the moment. I've printed your 37-page document to read offline. Why should they "therefore" be mathematical? I do explain HOW I come to these conclusions. But you won't read my explanation. And yet you ask for explanations? I've said it before and I'll repeat it: these essays examine basic concepts, which are treated as mathematical axioms. There is no way to deal with mathematical axioms mathematically. Now read TIME EXPLAINED, respond with relevant points, and let's have a Science-based criticism of Farsight's theories. All this pathetic flak I'm getting certainly isn't science-based criticism. editing, please wait

Why do we exist? Go ask a philosopher. Why is there matter? Because stable solitons are knots. Photons are obviously the lowest energy state? No, they're just the simplest. It's space. And you still haven't read TIME EXPLAINED, or you would have noticed the 1920 Leyden address quote from Einstein: "According to the general theory of relativity, space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable inedia, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it". Here's how it works. I explain it. You don't read it. Then you give your Science-based criticism of Farsight's Theories and say I'm waving my hands. No chance. There's not a string in sight. RELATIVITY+ is geometry in 3+1 dimensions. Captain: can we have a little moderation here? It's somewhat rich for you to claim I don't explain something such as charge when you refuse to read my essay CHARGE EXPLAINED. In the frame of somebody comoving with the electron. I've got an essay on REFERENCE FRAMES too. ******************************************************** What questions? A scattergun of red herrings covering the whole Standard Model and any other mendacious distraction anybody can think up? I'm still not seeing any Science-based criticism of Farsight's theories here This thread was spun out of the time travel and wormholes thread, where I said time travel is impossible. And still nobody will actually read TIME EXPLAINED where I explain why. Groan. People would rather believe in time travel than read why it is not possible. Nor will they read ENERGY EXPLAINED, or MASS EXPLAINED or CHARGE EXPLAINED and ask me direct challenging and relevant questions on the contents therein. Ben's comment above says it all. He effectively says Farsight doesn't explain, and simply will not admit that We don't want to know. Now, if you'll excuse me, the sun is shining and I've got things to do.

I can't show you a rigorous mathematical approach. I don't know how, and it isn't easy: check out the moebius strip and how it's been a mathematical problem for decades. An entity like an electron exhibits wave/particle duality because it's a soliton. It isn't some billiard ball nugget that has "got" charge, the charge is part of the topological defect that the electron is. It doesn't have a surface, and you can only detect it with something just like it. You end up with just waves and geometry, and the closest analogy I can give is that the wave function is what it is. And I'm still not seeing any scientific criticism that actually refers to my "theories". Even now, nobody is asking me questions about TIME EXPLAINED, which is the issue that brought us here. ************************************** I've addressed it in CHARGE EXPLAINED. If you'd like to refer to it and challenge some aspect of it, no problem. But I'm seeing a continued refusal to even read my essays, which IMHO makes a mockery of Science-based criticism of Farsight's Theories. ************************************* See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_relaxation. If the loop isn't just sitting there as a free electron it isn't being stretched and it isn't relaxing. No you can't make it go round an additional wavelength or just use a different wavelength. How? I don't know. But if you read CHARGE EXPLAINED you might learn more. Here we go again, no actual reference to "Farsight's Theories" but plenty of criticism. ***************************************** The photon is not some little billiard ball particle. Do you remember I used quotes around the word "particle" when I was talking about photons? A photon is a transverse wave. It's just geometry. What do you mean how does a photon transmit photons? You can't get a particle with charge -1 from a particle with charge zero. You have to use pair production, and then you get a particle with charge +1 and another with charge -1. This is obvious. The fact that nobody has responded to you on this makes me think that this thread is dishonest. Red light doesn't shake hard enough.

BELIEF EXPLAINED When I analysed my basic concepts, I found things that weren’t real, that don’t exist, that we never actually see. But we assume they’re real, we take them for granted, and we believe in them. Because we have holes in our understanding, holes that we’ve all grown up with. We’ve lived with them for so long that we don’t know they’re there any more. We cover them up with ignorance of our ignorance, with our blindness of our blind spot, and we shield ourselves with a peer pressure that persuades there are no alternatives to consider. We do it because we are social animals, we follow the herd, we are prey to groupthink. That’s the way we are. So much so, that we even place our faith in negative carpets. What’s a negative carpet? I hear you say. Well, let’s say that the wife is so impressed with the new lounge carpet, that she now wants a new carpet for the guest bedroom. The room is square, and we need sixteen square metres. What’s the square root of sixteen? There are two solutions, four and minus four. So, wise guy that I am, I opt for the latter solution, and get down on my hands and knees to cut a big fat square out of our brand new living room carpet. I roll it up, put it over my shoulder, and take it to the carpet shop, walking backwards for dramatic effect. I hand it over to the proprietor and pay him a minus ten pound note, which I stick in my pocket, then go home to crack open a bottle of wine and greet my guests. We are standing in the living room examining my negative carpet and discussing its negative mass when the wife walks in. She stands there open-mouthed as I begin to explain the merely technical details of relocation to the guest bedroom. Then all hell breaks loose. Get the picture? The thing about all this, is that a solution is sometimes absurd, but it's not always plain. People just don't spot it. So we talk about it quite seriously without examining whether it’s a real solution. We end up taking it for granted and using it to search for further solutions. Then when we struggle, we forget to track back to the beginning and look at the thing we took for granted. We don’t realise we’re riding a negative carpet, and that’s why physics is getting nowhere. What it all boils down to, is that a negative carpet doesn’t exist. It isn’t real. It’s just a figment of our imagination. A belief. I need to talk about belief. Your belief. It’s important. If I don’t talk to you about your belief, you won’t believe what I tell you. Then you won’t share the vision. You won’t see the light. Believe me, this is important. It was Richard Feynman who said “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”. This is more true than you realise. It’s true because when you’ve fooled yourself, you don’t know it. You convince yourself that you haven’t fooled yourself, and you develop a conviction, a faith, a belief about it. You will be quite irrational in defence of this belief. You will not test your belief in an empirical scientific fashion. Instead you will become incredulous, and perhaps even insulting. If you don’t behave this way, that’s fine, you’re not a believer. You merely have an opinion, or better still, an open mind. What’s that I hear you say? You do have an open mind? I’m sure you like to think so. But let me goad you by saying this: No you don’t. You’re fooling yourself. At which point I can see you bristling already. See how it works? The truth is this: you’re not quite as open minded or as rational as you think. This is hard to accept, but that’s the way it is. It’s like that because if you believe something, you don’t need to think about it. Because you already know the answer. Hence you are less receptive than you should be, and can be too quick to dismiss. Stop a minute and think about it. Why do you think we have suicide bombers? What on earth possesses them to think that there’s seventy two virgins waiting for them in paradise? What possesses them is something called The Pschyology of Belief. And they don’t think, that’s just it. This thing is far more powerful and far more prevalent than you realise. There’s a whole spectrum of belief out there. Think about Young Earth Creationists. You can talk to these people until you’re blue in the face, but they are totally immune to logic because they believe that they are right. You can say anything and everything, but they duck and dive and dismiss every last scrap of evidence you throw at them. Everything you say goes whoosh, in one ear and out the other. They just aren’t listening. They just aren’t thinking. The weird thing is that they don’t know they’re immune to logic. These guys aren’t lying to you. They just don’t have a rational open mind. But they don’t know it. They think they’re being perfectly sensible, and you’re just some crazy fool who just doesn’t know. It doesn’t stop at religion. There’s ideology, Kafkaesque bureacracy, and insane conspiracy theory. There’s things like heroin addiction where people usually end up killing themselves. Moving down the scale there’s conditions such as obesity and anorexia. Then there’s gentler symptoms like fashion, where folk let themselves be brainwashed into thinking purple is the new black, or walking around with an unethical cotton bag over their shoulder. It affects everybody to some degree, even people who consider themselves to be very rational and extremely open minded. Everybody’s got some kind of belief about something. When you find it and hit it, whoosh, everything you say goes in one ear and out the other. They just don’t listen. They just don’t think. They think they think, but they don’t. It’s like the shutters are down and there’s nobody home. Would you like to put yourself to the test? This will show you what I mean. This will demonstrate to you how you yourself are not immune to The Psychology of Belief. Nobody is, not even me. Look at the picture below: Now, squares A and B are the same colour. They’re the same shade of grey. Oh no they’re not, I hear you say. Oh yes they are I insist. Oh no they’re not you answer back. We could do this all day, but I’m right and you’re wrong. They really are the same colour. Squares A and B are the same shade of grey. The apparent difference in colour is an illusion. I’ll prove it. It’s very simple. Just tilt the page so you’re looking at it from a narrow angle. Alternatively fold the paper to get the two squares next to one another. Another method is look through a small hole to remove the context that fooled you into fooling yourself. You can look at it online if you wish, google on “checkerboard illusion” or go to echalk optical illusions directly. Check it out for yourself. Satisfy yourself. Be empirical, test yourself, find a way to stop fooling yourself. Then you realise that A and B really are the same colour. Don’t be surpised. I told you The Psychology of Belief is powerful. More powerful than you ever dreamed. What’s surprising is just how common it is, even amongst scientists. Conviction is a hard nut to crack. It’s the way we are, the way we think. Why do you think it took Einstein seventeen years to get a Nobel Prize for the wrong thing? Why do you think there’s that saying: catch ‘em young? It’s because there are people out there who are fully aware that if you instill children with a belief when they’re very young, they’ll carry on believing it come heaven or high water. These children remain so utterly convinced, that they grow up to become adults who will fight and die for it. But we’re not going to fight and die for something like The Capacity To Do Work are we? Because we are rational, we have an open mind, and we listen and we think. Yes, The Capacity To Do Work. Can you explain energy to your grandmother? You might believe you can, but the chances are you’re fooling yourself, and your explanation is no explanation at all. Your grandmother will peer at you over her bifocals, suck on her false teeth, say Thank you Dear, then she’ll get on with her knitting or whatever. She’s too polite to say it, because butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But what she really meant is: Capacity To Do Work my arse. Come on now, The Capacity To Do Work is no explanation at all. You swallowed that when you were young and gullible, and you haven’t looked at it since. Energy is a simple basic concept that you really ought to understand, but you don’t. And you don’t know that you don’t. Because you don’t know what you don’t know. And what you also don’t know, is that the Capacity To Do Work is merely a label that covers up a hole in your understanding. A hole that you’ve grown up with, that’s been there so long it’s like a blind spot, you don’t even know it’s there. I’ll show you the holes in your understanding, I’ll peel back the labels and fill the holes with concepts that are crystal clear. Then you can stop fooling yourself. But not entirely. Remember this, it’s important: the basic concepts I will give you are better than the concepts you hold now. But don’t ever think they’re perfect. Don’t fool yourself that you’ve stopped fooling yourself. Keep that open mind open. Are you ready? It’s time to begin, and it all starts with time. Einstein said Time is Suspect, and he was right. Once you understand time, everything else is easy.

Captain: here are my answers to the questions you listed. A bound electron can be viewed as a stretched elastic loop, and changes in the degree of stretch are achieved via the transmission of photons. In this geometrical model, there are no billiard-ball particles, and no solid surfaces. There are only waves, and stable soliton configurations of those waves. There is nothing other than waves to effect a change in the bond of the stable soliton we call an electron. At "rest" is a relative term. If I am moving in line with an electron, I can consider it to be at rest. Internally however, the component photon is always travelling in a tight half-wavelength moebius loop, and the electron exhibits zitterbewegung. In this respect the electron is never at rest. But note that this thread is a Science-based criticism of Farsight's theories. And yet it has pointedly avoided the very topic it pretends to address. Here is an essay that describes the psychological issue associated with belief that makes people unable to examine their convictions: BELIEF EXPLAINED And here is the first "theory", an essay that explains why time travel is impossible: TIME EXPLAINED Yes, I class this essay as a speculation, because it isn't in accord with accepted theory. But can we have a science-based criticism of it please? Can somebody show, using a rational argument, why this essay is wrong and why time travel is possible?

It isn't an appeal to authority. Time Explained is giving you history. Quotes. The mathematical model is very difficult. I don't know how to revise Minkowski spacetime to say you have no freedom of motion in the time dimension. The issues are to do with interpretation, like the curved spacetime that isn't in The Foundation of General Relativity. What argument has Ben presented? He hasn't actually read Time Explained, and he isn't referring to it or any other element of RELATIVITY+. He never has. This is no Science-based criticism of Farsight's Theories. It's Call Farsight a crackpot and bombard him with Standard Model. It's Kafkaesque absurdity, not a rational scientifc debate of the subject. There is no good faith. You want to see some history? See Ben's post above? See this little portion of it? Here's the thread he was referring to: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=64240&page=4&highlight=time+explained And this: Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go.

Norm: Of course, it's not actually stopped. It's still travelling at c. But round and round. It's going nowhere fast. Klaynos: re perturbation theory. Maybe. Re the moebius doughnut, see pictures below. The one one the left depicts an electron, but note that there are no surfaces. Note the line with the arrowhead, and the resemblance to the ballon knot. Captain: That's no red herring. Time Explained is the most important element of RELATIVITY+. It tells you about Einstein, and what he thought about time. It ends up by saying Re your challenge, I am collating these essays into one cohesive document. It's the "paper" I mentioned earlier. But it's not a quick job. And whilst this thread is Science-based criticisms of Farsight's Theories, nobody will actually refer to my material. You even think Time Explained is a red herring! So even if I did put up a document here, I fear it would languish in pseudoscience and speculations. I don't think anybody would read it, and I'd still be getting the "crackpot" abuse. Oh yes you do squeal to moderators. And you are always the first with personal attacks. How many people have you called crackpot now? And you are so arrogant you put me in the same pot as Creationism. Your sneering arrogant dishonesty is utterly breathtaking. You're paid to do String Theory. It isn't a theory and strings are long gone. It's The Trouble with Physics remember? I'm not telling you you have no position to judge. I'm telling you that before you judge, you should examine the information. Instead you merely prejudge. But whatever else would I expect from a String Theorist? Especially one with a proven track record of seeking to rubbish the competition. Like LQG and the thread where Martin picked you up. You're so full of yourself you're like a dentist who thinks he can judge teeth without looking at them. Geddoutofit. The first problem you found with my ideas was that you didn't like the title TIME EXPLAINED. And that's as far as you got, and as much as you read. Where have I ever talked about pions in RELATIVITY+? Absolutely nowhere. The number one axiom you hold is time is the fourth dimension. It isn't. You simply cannot move through it. It means spacetime is a space. It changes everything. You don't criticise my ideas, you won't address them, you attack my character, without even reading my ideas. You don't want to read it, and you don't want anybody else to read it, because you can't bear the thought that somebody is coming up with something good and you've wasted years on String Theory. And you convince yourself that you're an open minded rational scientist? LOL. You're losing this argument Ben. Because your arrogance and absurdity is oh so plain.

Post deleted, I got called away, see below.

CHARGE EXPLAINED v2.0 Charge is another one of those things you learn about in physics. Well, you think you do, but you don’t. Not really. The textbooks don’t explain it, and they shrug off this omission by telling you it’s fundamental. It isn’t. It’s as fundamental as mass, which is not very fundamental at all. The thing is this: if you understand mass you already understand charge. But you probably don’t realise it yet. So I’ll explain it. Let’s start with the easy stuff. We know that we can rub a balloon to create an electric field. It can pick up a piece of paper or make your hair stand up. We’ve all seen and felt a spark of static, blue and crackling as electricity tears the air. We know that high voltage is called high tension, and tension is negative stress and stress is pressure. So we’re happy with the fluid analogy where a current flows from the negative to the positive terminals of a battery. It doesn’t much matter that they got electricity backwards. We just measure the rate of flow in terms of amperage, and multiply by time to get charge, and multiply again by voltage to get energy. We work out that the amount of charge in a battery is all about the number of electrons available to flow, and we know that our charged-up balloon has a surplus of them above and beyond its protons. So, how much charge is in a flat battery? None, I hear you say. Wrong. It’s chock full of charge. It’s full of positive charge and negative charge. That’s why it’s got mass. That’s why it’s a tangible material object. If there wasn’t any charge, it would be a whole heap of gamma radiation, and you and I would be looking like something out of Mars Attacks! But let’s keep it simple and stick to electrons. What is it about these electrons that keeps our laptops humming? What is this thing called “charge” that causes motion? The answer is trivial once you know how to see it. Go to the kitchen, get a glass, then quickly fill it with water and hold it up to the window. You’ll see bubbles swirling and silvery, pop pop popping. They aren’t actually silver of course, they just look that way because they distort the light. Now go to the cutlery drawer and pull out a spoon. It’s silvery. Metals look that way because they are awash with mobile electrons. When you look at a spoon you are seeing those electrons, or more properly, their charge. It’s reflective, silvery. Charge looks like this for the same reason as those bubbles. It’s like a highway mirage on a hot sunny day. You see what looks like water on the road far ahead, but it’s merely the light from the sky bent towards your eye. You are seeing distortion, and it’s silvery like a bubble because it bends light. Charge is distortion too. Charge is “curl”. Charge is twist. If it wasn’t there, your electrons would be gamma photons of 511KeV apiece. To show you how it works, I need you to play with plates. Take two dinner plates, one in each hand. Find a swimming pool or a pond, preferably on a sunny windless day. Dip one of the plates halfway into the water. Now stroke it gently forward in a paddling motion whilst lifting it clear. Notice that you create a “U-tube” double whirlpool that moves slowly forward through the water. This is a Falaco Soliton. If your pool is big enough, the double whirlpool will settle down into two dimples on the surface of the water, visible as two black-spot shadows on the bottom. They are very stable, and can persist for maybe an hour. But you don’t need to wait for that. Create one double whirlpool with one dinner plate, then step to one side and create another one with the other dinner plate. You’ll need a little practice, but after a while you’ll have the knack of it, and you’ll be able to create two double whirlpools with ease. Aim them at each other. Watch carefully. Notice what happens. If the left-hand-side of one double whirlpool closes with the right-hand-side of the other, the two opposite whirlpools move together. If the left-hand-side of one double whirlpool closes with the left-hand-side of the other, the two similar whirlpools move apart. What you are seeing is attraction and repulsion. Now aim two double whirlpools straight at one another, face on. This is best in a shallow pond with a muddy bottom. The two double whirlpools meet and merge and are gone with a surprisingly energetic puff of muddy water. You’ve just seen annihilation. It’s another fluid analogy of course. It isn’t a perfect analogy because the vacuum of space is not a fluid like water. Space doesn’t flow. It’s more like an elastic solid, but one with no solidity at all. There’s nothing there, but energy can travel through it, and we can talk about a photon as a stress volume travelling through space like a transverse wave propagating through a block of ghostly transparent rubber. Then we can understand mass by talking about pair production, where a massless gamma photon is converted into an electron and a positron: The thing to note is that both the electron and the positron can be viewed as a photon configured as a moebius doughnut, a travelling stress that twists and turns to stay in place. The difference is that one twists and turns one way, and the other twists and turns the other way. They are mirror images of opposite chirality, primitive 3D knots tied different ways. They’re knots of stress in space, so the electron isn’t some little particle that’s “got” charge extending out into space. Instead charge is one of the things that the electron is. While they’re travelling stresses rather than travelling fluid, the electron and positron will attract one another like the Falaco solitons. When they meet it’s like pushing two opposite twists of fishing line together: twang. The electron and the positron annihilate, and become gamma photons flying off in opposite directions like that puff of muddy water. It’s energy that’s fundamental. Not mass or charge. You cannot create energy, and you cannot destroy it. But you can create charge just as you can create mass, via pair production. And you can destroy charge just as you can destroy mass, via annihilation. Because charge is the twist that you need to apply to a travelling stress to keep it twisting and turning in one place to re-present momentum as inertia. And because there’s nothing solid to brace against in this pure marble geometric world where stable particles are knots, the only way to make a twist is to make an untwist at the same time. That’s why charge is always conserved. Yes, you can make a mass that doesn’t exhibit any charge, but that’s only because one twist is countered by another, as in a neutron. A neutron has charge, like a flat battery has charge. The positive charge is matched by the negative. There’s charge there, but you just don’t notice it while the neutron is pinned down stable in a nucleus. However should the neutron escape that nucleus, it wobbles itself apart in about ten minutes. Then the charge is obvious. The neutron decays into a neutrino plus an electron and a proton that were in a way there all the time. They’re two opposite twists, but they’re different sizes and shapes that can’t annihilate each other. This twist is what charge is. It’s a twist in the thing you call space, stretching out into space. This is why you could call an electric field a “twist field”. Let’s see how it affects an electron. Remember, an electron is a photon travelling in a twisting turn, a moebius doughnut. In very simple terms you can consider it to be a circle looking this: o. Drop it into a cube of space like this: ◙. If we take a side view of our photon at one instant in time, it looks like a vertical slice of the moebius doughnut. Now twist the cube from top to bottom. What happens to the slice? It tilts. The orientation has changed. It’s now angled downwards. So the photon will travel downwards while it’s also travelling in a twisting turning loop. Hence the electron digs down through the electric field like a drill bit. That’s how attraction works. Repulsion is the same sort of thing, but of course a positron goes the other way, like a drill in reverse. Note that that the electric field isn’t just a twist in one dimension, it’s actually in three dimensions. Your electron digs down like a drill bit from any direction. But it’s very difficult to think in three dimensions. Our primary input is visual, and whilst binocular vision permits depth perception, we tend to think in two dimensions. That’s why getting the feel for something is what intuition and grasp are all about. It gives us a better, three-dimensional concept. To appreciate this, get a block of plasticine or maybe the wax from Babybel cheese, and make a cube. Now try twisting it in three dimensions. Two twists is easy: twist, turn, twist. But doing the third one is surprisingly difficult. In the end you have to just do it by feel: twist turn, twist turn, twist. You end up with something like this: The easiest way to get your head round the geometry is to imagine that the twisted cube is a twisted block of water, and we’ve got to swim through it. As you’re swimming behind me you find that all the twisting and turning means you’ve got to swim further than you thought, and you come out of the other side gasping for air. But you now understand refraction. Light travels slower through a glass block because it’s got to make its way through all that twisting and turning in all directions, be it positive or negative. Talking of turning, let’s talk about magnetism. Imagine that you’re flying through space, but the space ahead of you is twisted like a catherine wheel because of the electric field. Hold your arms out and walk forwards like you’re an aeroplane. When you encounter the twisted space lean into the twist. The twisted space will make you rotate in an anticlockwise fashion. It will make you turn. We now use Relativity to work out that if you aren’t travelling through space but you find yourself turning, then the twist must be travelling through you. That’s what happens when a current flows through a wire. Imagine the current is flowing down a wire from your eyes into the page. It’s flowing from negative to positive, so this introduces an anticlockwise twist: ...← ↓ ¤ ↑ o ...→ (Please ignore the dots, this website compresses out the spaces) The nearby electron o is basically a circling photon. This comes full circle in the twisting space before it has gone round 360 degrees. So it ends up at a different place, and describes a cycloid motion. Hence it follows the twist and goes round the wire like it’s in a washing machine, like swarf going round a drill bit. It really is that simple. The electric field is effectively a “twist field”, and if you move through it you perceive a magnetic field, which is effectively a “turn field”. It’s so obvious once you see it. And you can see it. You can see how a magnetic field changes the polarization plane of a beam of light via the Faraday effect. That’s the utter simplicity of electromagnetism: twist and turn. It tells you a battery is like a wind-up clockwork spring, only the twist is in space rather than steel. The electric twist extends forward with the flowing current, and it makes things turn like a pump-action screwdriver. This is the principle of the electric motor. But you can turn a screw with an ordinary screwdriver too, extending the twist forward. That’s the principle of the dynamo. Beautiful. Most materials aren’t magnetic because all this twisting and turning is equal and opposite in all directions, even for your charged-up balloon. It’s what you call isotropic. When it isn’t, that’s when you get a magnet. Fly through an electric field or past a stationary electron, and you experience more twist in the direction of travel, so you “see” a magnetic field that makes you turn. Move an electron towards you and you get the same effect. All you need to do to make an actual magnet is arrange the atoms so that the electrons jitter round in the same orientation. ...← ↓...↑ ...→ o The electron is moving in a circular fashion, so its component photon doesn’t need to complete a full 360 degrees to turn around. It’s like the earth going round the sun - a day is less than one full rotation of the earth, lasting 23hours 56 minutes instead of 24 hours. As far as the electron is concerned there’s a component of the “turn” left over, and you end up with a magnetic field similar to what you’d see if you flew past a stationary electron. It’s rather like the inverse of the current in the wire situation, but with no current and no wire. Whilst I describe a magnetic field is a “turn field”, you have to remember that space is like a ghostly elastic solid. The electric field is the “twisted space”, and the magnetic field is only your relativistic view when you move through it. There are no actual regions of space turning round and round like roller bearings. That’s why you can’t have magnetic monopoles. But you can have superconductors. High temperature superconductors consist of copper oxide planes. The atoms present an array of opposite magnetic fields rather like a conveyor belt, allowing electrons to zip through effortlessly like they’re not moving at all. The array of magnetic fields act like wheels. ...← ↓ ¤ ↑ ...→ o → ...→ ↑ ¤ ↓ ...← It is of course a little more complicated than that. Wheels need bearings and axles. Here’s a couple of pictures of a high-temperature superconductor called yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO for short. The chemical formula is YBa2Cu3O7 and it’s a crystal so you get repeating groups. Look at the second picture. In simple terms the “wheels” are where the green pyramids are. Low temperature superconductors aren’t quite the same. You have to think Barn Dance, where you’re an electron with a “Cooper pair” dance partner making your own magnetic fields as you go. When everybody’s cool, the dance line is tidy and you swing easily from one end to the other. But when it’s hot and late and everybody’s bumping around pissed, you spill somebody’s beer, lose your partner to a “phase slip”, and get into a fight. Yeehah. Interestingly, in both types of superconduction the superconductor is what’s called diamagnetic. It doesn’t get magnetised because of the Meissner Effect, where all the internal opposite magnetic fields scramble an applied magnetic field like a billion egg whisks, hence it doesn’t get very far into the material. All interesting stuff. But not as interesting as the electron itself. Here’s the secret: cut a strip of paper, maybe an inch wide and ten inches long. Draw a very flattened X across the length of it, to represent the sinusoidal electric and magnetic fields over half a photon wavelength. That’s the slanted curly twisted χ to the right of the M in the middle of this picture: Mark the top left hand corner of your strip with an E, and the bottom left corner with an M. Mark the top right hand corner with an M and the bottom right corner with an E. This kind of thing: E ......................M ............X............ M ......................E Turn the paper over and repeat. Now loop it around and twist it to make a moebius strip. You see the E adjoining the M and the M adjoining the E. That’s the nub of it, why the electron is a stable soliton. The electric field is the magnetic field and vice versa. The twist is the turn and the turn is the twist. It’s because of Relativistic abberation. Travel really fast and a horizontal line like this — looks skewed like this /. Travel at c like a photon and your horizontals look totally vertical. Change course fast and your change of course is skewed too, so you change course more than you meant to. And when you change course more, you’re doing it fast, so you change course even more. The details of this were worked out by Llewellyn Thomas in 1927, and is called Thomas Precession. Knock a photon just right to change its course, and it keeps on changing course because its velocity vector precesses π/2 times per revolution. The photon “thinks” its travelling in a straight line but it’s travelling like this: ∞. It’s all twisted, and it turns. It’s curly. It’s an electron. The twist and the turn are just two sides of the same thing. That’s how it always is. That’s why we have electromagnetism and the electromagnetic field. A magnetic field is the same thing as an electric field, it just depends how you’re looking at it. It depends on whether you’re moving through it or it’s moving through you. That’s Relativity for you. Once you learn how to see things the way they are, things get a whole lot simpler. An electron is what it is because it’s “got” charge, and charge is curl, charge is twist. The really really interesting thing about all this is that if charge isn’t fundamental, we can’t quite say that the photon is the mediator of the electromagnetic force. They got things back to front, like everything else to do with electricity, and it does matter. It matters a lot. It’s a matter of some... gravity.

Yes you are. The photon has no mass but does have energy/momentum... When a photon collides with a free electron, the electron gets a bump and goes recoiling off at an angle. Now remember your Relativity. There is no absolute motion. Imagine you’re the target electron, but it’s you moving instead of the photon. Bump, and you’re sent flying off at an angle. It would feel like the photon was a bump. It would feel like the photon had inertia instead of momentum. It would feel like the photon had mass. It would feel like the photon was solid. All you do to create mass is "stop" the photon by knocking it into a half-wavelength moebius loop. And then you call it an electron. All this is in MASS EXPLAINED, and it's brilliant groundbreaking science. The Higgs Boson is the pseudoscience. CHARGE EXPLAINED is even better. I'll put it up and then we can all talk about it a calm, friendly, open minded, rational fashion. Here: CHARGE EXPLAINED. You will appreciate that if I put it into pseudoscience, some will claim that I'm admitting I'm a crank, so I can't.

YT: maybe this might help. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production When I followed the TIME EXPLAINED link in my previous post, it said no thread specified. TIME EXPLAINED is science, time travel is pseduoscience and speculation. Anybody want to talk about the speed of light? Why time dilation shows us quite patently that gravity is a gradient in c rather than "spacetime curvature"? Anybody actually read this? http://www.citebase.org/abstract?id=oai%3AarXiv.org%3Aastro-ph%2F0305457 "Seen from another angle [16, 15], even in a world where all seems to vary and nothing is constant, it is always possible to define units such that c remains a constant. Consider for instance the current official definition of the meter: one takes the period of light from a certain atomic transition as the unit of time, then states that the meter is the distance travelled by light in a certain number of such periods. With these definitions it is clear that c will always be a constant, a statement akin to saying that the speed of light is one light-year per year. One then does not need to perform any experiment to prove the constancy of the speed of light: it is built into the definition of the units and has become a tautology".

Noted Luke. Again, noted. I can't tell you how a photon turns into a pion offhand. But I can say how it turns into an electron or positron. But what's the point? I could post up a detailed explanation, but like TIME EXPLAINED, it will be ignored and ridiculed or even deleted. Klaynos: somebody comes up with an idea, a hypothesis, they talk about it, they develop it into a model or a theory, talk about it some more, maybe collaborate with somebody, they write a formal paper with rigor and predictions, et cetera. Other folk read the paper plus others and do experiments or make connections and develop new insights to develop the theory further. This is a discussion forum where I'd expect some genuine and sincere conversation about what I'm putting up instead of juvenile abuse like "boring nonsence". Which reminds me. The situation here is ludicrous. This thread is supposed to be a Science-based criticism of Farsight's theories. But it simply isn't. BenTheMan believes in time travel but will not read TIME EXPLAINED. It's deleted, censored, not examined. He doesn't need to examine it because he knows I'm wrong. His conviction is so strong he doesn't need to counter the simple logic I present. It's ridiculous Kafkaesque absurdity. It is remarkably similar to a medieval theocratic court quoting evidence from the bible whilst dismissing evidence that isn't in the bible, and meanwhile judging the heretic on his ability to quote from the bible. Sigh. It's a pitiful, shameful, farce. If anybody wants to actually talk about some aspect of my model, fine. But otherwise, I think I've given you a fair crack of the whip. And I've got a paper to write. PS: Somebody please explain ad hominem and irony to Lockheed.

TIME EXPLAINED Time is very simple, once you get it. But “getting it” is so very difficult. That’s because your current concept of time is so deeply ingrained. You form a mental map of the world using your senses and your brain. You use this mental map to think, and you are so immersed in it that you can’t see things the way they really are. You are locked into an irrational conviction that clocks run, that days pass, that time flows, and that a journey takes a length of time. It takes steely logic to break out of this conditioning. First of all we need to look at your senses and the things you experience. Let’s start with sight. Look at the picture below: Squares A and B are the same colour. They’re the same shade of grey. The apparent difference in colour is an illusion. Look at it from a narrow angle and you'll realise I'm right. What this tells you is that colour is subjective. It isn’t a real property of things in the world. It’s perception, a quale, it’s in your head. A photon doesn’t actually have a colour. It has a wavelength, an oscillation, a frequency. What’s it’s got is a motion. Let’s move on to sound. Imagine a super-evolved alien bat with a large number of ears, like a fly’s eye. This bat would “see” using sound, and if it was sufficiently advanced it might even see in colour. But we know that sound is pressure waves, and when we look beyond this at the air molecules, we know that sound relies on motion. Pressure is related to sound, and to touch. You feel it in your ears on a plane, or on your chest if you dive. This pressure of air or water is not some property of the sub-atomic world. It’s a derived effect, and the Kinetic Theory of Gases tells us that pressure is derived from motion. You can also feel kinetic energy. If a cannonball in space travelling at 1000m/s impacted your chest you would feel it for sure. But apologies, my mistake. It isn't the cannonball doing 1000m/s. It's you. So where's the kinetic energy now? Can you feel it coursing through your veins? No. Because what’s really there is mass, and relative motion. You can also feel heat. Touch that stove and you feel that heat. We talk about heat exchangers and heat flow as if there’s some magical mysterious fluid in there. And yet we know there isn’t. We know that heat is another derived effect of motion. Taste is chemical in nature, and somewhat primitive. Most of your sense of taste is in fact your sense of smell. Do you know how smell works? Look up olfaction and you’ll learn about molecular shape. But the latest theory from a man called Luca Turin says it’s all down to molecular vibration, because isomers smell the same. That’s motion again. The point of all this is there’s a lot of motion out there, and most of your senses are motion detectors. But it probably never occurred to you because you’re accustomed to thinking about the world in terms of how you experience it, rather than the scientific, empirical, fundamental, ontological things that are there. And nowhere is this more so than with time. So, what is time? Let’s start by looking up the definition of a second: Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom... So, a second is nine billion periods of radiation. But what is a period? We know that radiation is electromagnetic in nature, the thing we commonly call light. We also know that light has a frequency. So let’s look at frequency: Frequency = 1 / T and Frequency = v / λ This says frequency is the reciprocal of the period T, and is also velocity v divided by wavelength λ . Combining the two, we can say T = λ / v, which means a period T is a wavelength λ divided by a velocity v. To try to find out more, we can drill down into wavelength and velocity. We know that a wavelength is a distance, a thing like a metre: The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second... And we know already that a velocity is a distance divided by a time. So if a period is a wavelength divided by a velocity, that means a period is a distance divided by a distance divided by a time. So let’s do some simple mathematics. Let’s work it through. We can combine T = λ / v and v = λ / t and write it down as: T = λ / ( λ / t). Then we can cancel out the λs to get: T = 1/(1/t) Then we cancel the double reciprocal to leave: T = t The answer we get is T = t. A period of time is a period of time. This mathematical definition of time is circular. What is its true nature? How do we dig down and get to the bottom of it? Let’s look at frequency some more. What’s the definition in English? Frequency is the measurement of the number of times that a repeated event occurs per unit of time. Our unit of time is the second. Frequency is the number of events per second. A second is nine billion periods of electromagnetic radiation. A period of radiation is an electromagnetic event, caused by an electromagnetic event happening inside an atom. For an event to happen, something has to move. Some component of the caesium atom has to travel some distance. A hyperfine transition is to do with magnetic dipole movement, a flip-flop interaction between the nucleus and an electron. It’s magnetic, so it’s electromagnetic in nature. Like the electron is electromagnetic in nature. Like the photon is electromagnetic in nature, because the photon is the “mediator“ of the electromagnetic force. So in some simple respect, we can consider some vital component of the atom to be electromagnetic just like light. The answer comes with a rush. It’s basically light moving inside the atom, and it’s travelling a distance. It does it nine billion times, and we call that a second. Then we use this second to measure the speed of light. We measure the speed of light in terms of the speed of light. In caesium atoms, in hydrogen atoms, in our own atoms, in the atoms of everything. No wonder it never changes. And so the penny drops: the mathematics is circular because time is circular. The interval between events is measured in terms of other events. And the interval between those events is measured in terms of other events. Until there are no events left, only intervals. And intervals are frozen timeless moments. But you need events, not frozen timeless intervals to mark out the time. The events aren’t in the time, the time is in the events. Because time is merely the measure of events, of change, measured against some other change. And for things to change, there has to be motion. You don’t need time to have motion. You need motion to have time. You don’t need regular atomic motion to mark out time. Any regular motion will do. Yes, we counted nine billion oscillations and called it a second. One, two, three… nine billion. But you don’t have to count hyperfine transitions in a caesium atom. You could count beans in a bucket. Ping, ping, ping, chuck them in, regular as clockwork. You’re sitting there counting beans into the bucket, ping, ping, ping, regular as clockwork. Now, what is the direction of time? The only direction that is actually there, is the direction of the beans you’re throwing. A fuller bucket is not the direction of time. More beans is not the direction of time. The direction of time is the direction of your counting, and I could have asked you to count the beans out of the bucket. There is no real direction. It’s as imaginary as the direction you take when you count along the set of integers. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 → It’s imaginary, so you cannot actually point in this direction. Nor can an arrow. There is no Arrow of Beans, so there is no Arrow of Time. And since there’s no direction, there’s no direction you can possibly travel in. And since you can’t travel, you can’t travel a length, and a length can’t pass you by. It’s all abstraction, a false concept rooted in the language we use to think. Yet we never ever think about what the words actually mean. Instead we say the clock is running slow as if a clock is an athlete. We say the day went quickly but it didn’t go anywhere. We say years pass, but they don’t go by like buses. The only directions that are there, are the directions of the spatial motions that make the events that we use to measure the intervals between the other events. What’s there is the motion of light, the motion of atoms, and the motion of clocks, buses, and rivers. What’s there is the motion of the earth, and the sun, moon, and stars. And these motions are being counted, incremented, added up. We count regular atomic motion to use as a ratio against some other motion, be it of light, clocks, or buses. All of these things have motion, both internal motion and travelling motion. And all those motions are real, with real directions in space. But the time direction isn't real. It's as imaginary as a trip to nine billion. That's why the past is only in your head, in your memory, in your records. It isn’t a place you can travel to. It’s just the places where things were. All those places that are still here in the universe. And while the past is the sum of all nows, now lasts for no time at all. Because there’s no time like the present, and time needs events, and when you take away the events, you take away the time. A second isn’t some slice of spacetime. It’s just nine billion motions of a caesium atom. Accelerate to half the speed of light and a second is still nine billion motions of a caesium atom. But there's only half the local motion there used to be, because the other half is already doing the travelling motion through space. That’s why time dilates. It’s easy to understand time dilation. Imagine yourself as a metronome. Each tick is a thought in your head, a beat in your heart, a second of your time. If you’re motionless with respect to me I see you ticking like this: |||. If you flash by in a spaceship, I see you ticking like this: /\/\/\. If you could reach c and we know you can’t, you wouldn’t tick at all. Your time would flatline like this ______ because any transverse motion would cause c to be exceeded. You wouldn’t tick for me, you wouldn’t tick for you, and you wouldn’t tick for anybody else in the universe. That’s the thing we’re interested in. The universe. That’s the thing that’s out there, the thing we’re a part of, the thing we’re trying to understand. It’s full of motion, and this is what it’s like: What can you see? What can you measure? You can measure the height. You can measure the width. And if it wasn't just a picture you could measure the depth. That's three Dimensions, with a capital D because we have freedom of movement in those dimensions. What else can you see? What else can you measure? You might imagine a fourth dimension, a time dimension. But the picture comes from the wikipedia temperature page. It’s a gif, a moving image, and in that image, those red and blue dots are moving. The thing you can measure is temperature. Temperature is an aspect of heat, an emergent property, a derived effect of atomic and molecular motion. When you measure the temperature, you are measuring an aggregate motion. If you were one of those dots, you would not talk of climbing to a “higher temperature”. There is no real height. You can’t literally climb to a higher temperature. Hence we don’t call temperature a dimension. But people did. Temperature used to be called a dimension, but the word has gradually changed from its original meaning of “measure”, and is now assumed to be something that offers a degree of freedom, something you can move through. We are immersed in time like the dots are immersed in temperature. It’s a different measure, but just as we cannot travel in temperature because there is no real height, we cannot travel in time because there is no real length. Because time is a dimension with a small d. There is no degree of freedom. I can hop backwards a metre but not backwards a second. Because time is a measure of change rather than a measure of place, and it has no absolute units, because you can only measure one change of place against another. It’s a relative measure of motion. The units are relative, and that’s what Special Relativity was telling us all along. Special Relativity tells us that your relative velocity alters your measurement of space and time compared to everybody else. You increase your relative velocity and space appears to contract while time dilates by a factor of √(1-v2/c2). If you travel at .99c, space appears to contract to one seventh of its former size. So your trip to a star seven light years away only takes you a year. But physics is about the universe, and in that universe it took you seven years. The star didn’t become a disc because you flashed by. The space in the universe didn’t really contract because you travelled through it. But your time did. It’s difficult to be sure about the history. There are certainly some surprises for the general reader. Einstein started off by saying there is no absolute time, using the “Lorentz Invariance” postulate that says the the speed of light is always measured to be the same. He knew this didn’t explain why the speed of light is always measured to be the same, and this seems such an obvious next step. But then his former teacher Hermann Minkowski invented the idea of spacetime. This nailed down time as the fourth dimension and moved the goalposts in the wrong direction. Einstein was most unhappy about it and said: “Since the mathematicians pounced on the relativity theory I no longer understand it myself”. The consensus is that Einstein had come round to valuing the mathematical reformulation when General Relativity came out in 1916. But when you read the original translation, he doesn’t actually mention curved spacetime at all. And he seemed somewhat unconvincing with the Twins Paradox in 1918, using acceleration in an explanation which doesn’t account for passing clocks. Then in 1920 he gave an address at the University of Leyden: According to the general theory of relativity, space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable inedia, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it. He doesn’t talk about spacetime, he talks about space. He even talks about aether, which is taboo. But we just don’t get to hear about this kind of stuff. It seems as if there’s been some rewriting of history going on, and we’re somehow steered away from what Einstein actually said, to what people say he said. I don’t know his innermost thoughts, but I read hints such as “time is suspect”, I look at that hangdog expression, and I wonder What do you know? I think Einstein worked it out at some point. I’m not sure when. Certainly by 1949: In his response to Godel's paper in the Schilpp volume, Einstein acknowledged that "the problem here disturbed me at the time of the building up of the general theory of relativity." This problem he described as follows: "Is what remains of temporal connection between world-points in the theory of relativity an asymmetrical relation (like time, intuitively understood, and unlike space), or would one be just as much justified to assert A is before B as to assert that A is after B? The issue could also be put this way: is relativistic space-time in essence a space or a time." (Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein). I think he wanted to tell the truth, but people couldn’t handle the truth. And he was afraid to shout it in case people thought he was a crazy old fool. And so the misinterpretation carried on: Godel didn’t “find a way to time travel” with his rotating universe. He merely used this conjecture to demonstrate that time could not have passed if you could visit the past: It is a widely known but insufficiently appreciated fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. They walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German-Austrian science in which they had grown up. What is not widely known is that in 1949 Godel made a remarkable discovery: there exist possible worlds described by the theory of relativity in which time, as we ordinarily understand it, does not exist. He added a philosophical argument that demonstrates, by Godel's lights, that as a consequence, time does not exist in our world either. If Godel is right, Einstein has not just explained time; he has explained it away.” (Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein). That’s the true meaning of Special Relativity. Time exists like heat exists. It’s real because it does things to us. But just like heat it’s an emergent property, a derived effect of motion. Time isn’t absolute, it isn’t fundamental. It isn’t a dimension like the dimensions of space. We don’t see four dimensional spacetime. We see three dimensions of space, and we see motion through it. It isn’t a 4-dimensional world, it’s 3+1 at best. The speed of light was always the problem, and time was always the answer. Because at the speed of light there’s no time left for anything else to happen. It’s why c isn’t really a speed, because you run out of time trying to get there. And if there’s no time, there’s no speed, because speed is distance divided by time. The thing called c is in reality a conversion factor, between the measure of distance and the measure we call time. It’s the motion that’s king, the velocity of light that defines your very metres and your seconds. Your velocity shouldn’t be measured by the things it defines. It should be measured as a fraction of c, in “natural units”. Because it’s motion we see, and c is the ultimate motion, how fast things happen, the inescapable property of photons and those electromagnetic things from which we’re made. From which the universe is made. The universe is not a block universe, it is a world in motion. The worldlines are only in mathematical space, and in your head. There’s no place that’s the future, and no place that’s the past. There’s only this place, and the time is always now. We don’t travel in time at one second per second. We don't travel in time at all. Relativistic clocks don’t travel in time at different rates, they travel through the universe at fractions of c. When they collide, they collide at the same location at the same “time”, whatever their faces say is local time. To travel backwards in time we'd need to unevent events, we’d need negative motion. But motion is motion whichever way it goes. You can’t have negative motion, just as you can’t have negative distance. Just as you can’t have negative carpets. So you can’t travel in time. There are no time travel paradoxes, because there is no time travel, and there is no time travel because time is just a relative measure of motion. And motion is travel. You can’t travel through travel. So those celebrity physicists who talk earnestly of time machines are wrong. Dead wrong. Not even wrong. You wonder how they can get it so wrong. And all those folk who puzzle about the beginning of time are chasing a dream. There never was any beginning of time. Time didn’t start thirteen point seven billion years ago. Because time didn’t start in the first place. It was motion that started in the first place. It was a place, not a time. And it’s this place, the place we call the universe, marked out by every light path you can track through timeless space. That’s how far we’ve come. A long long way, in no time at all. But now we can move on. Because now we’ve got the key, Einstein’s key, the key that unlocks all the doors in physics: spacetime is a space.