Farsight

This theory I am discussing here, proposes you accept the fact that all that space, is a figment of imagination, and has nothing to do with how the universe works. This theory states space is not there, not in the nothingness sense, and not in the spacial sense.

yep, attack the people you are trying to convince. That makes a lot of sense [/sarcasm]. Watch the ad homs.

Oh, the irony.

But then you compared them to time. That is you used those experiences as analogous to (in some way like) Time. Therefore they were analogies.

No, colour perception and heat etc are not analogies of time! You want to label them as analogies so you can then say they're weak/false analogies, and all you're doing is showing that you're clutching at a straw man argument.

Well from what did you base your ideas on? These are the axioms in your essay. You present initial "ideas" that the rest of your essay is based on. These are the axioms.

The essay is all about challenging the "time is a length" axiom. To defend this axiom you're accusing me of holding axioms. What axioms? Are you going to say my challenge to your axiom is an axiom and is therefore disqualified?

No matter how rigorous you logic, if you start from incorrect assumptions/axioms/ideas/etc about reality then you will end up with conclusions that do not conform to reality.

More of the same. All you've got disprove the essay is your axiomatic concept of time which the essay challenges.

I'm sorry, are you calling established mathematical concepts not rigorous logic? I have shown that using the mathematical definition of a dimension that time is a dimension.

This is yet more of the same proof by axiom. If you've proven what you think you've proven, you've also proven that temperature is a dimension.

I have also shown that you claim/idea/axiom that Time is dependant on velocity is wrong (through mathematics). I have also demonstrated that conclusions drawn from your ideas/axioms/claims produce results, and confirmed by you as being correct (in one place you stated that you essay meant that there was an absolute frame of reference - that there is an absolute "now"), that do not agree with known and observed reality.

No you haven't. If you think you have, use this as the point I referred to in my previous post. Let's home in on that point and debate it until we're both satisfied.

Yes, as I stated above (several times now), that I did use the :time is length" preposition/axiom/idea/concept as a starting place, but then I explored what would happen if this was true. I didn't just state "ergo your essay is wrong QED". I explored what it would mean if it was correct. I also did this for your claims/idea/concepts/prepositions/axioms that you presented in your essay/theory/post and reached conclusions that you even corrected me on...

The rest of your post is a claim that you've used careful reason and logic to prove that TIME EXPLAINED is false. No way have you done this. And instead of repeating your proof or a vital element of it, you repeat your assertation of proof. Come on Ed, repeat your most telling point, let's focus in on it and nail it.

You've quoted "metaphysics of little merit" several times. Who, besides you, has used that phrase in this thread? For someone who wants to be taken seriously and proclaims to not be a crackpot, you are doing a poor job of differentiating your behavior. Proclaiming your work to be Nobel-worthy (if you could only prove it) is but the latest example. Prove it already. Do something scientific with it.

Nobody has used that phrase in this thread, but see your post #24.

More insiduous digs I see, proclaims and poor job and yes, out comes the crackpot. You can't tackle the argument, so you attack me instead. And in the same breath you lecture me about being scientific. Hmmn.

Ed, they weren't analogies. Those are things we experience, and they're all derived from motion. Look up ontology.

TIME EXPLAINED is an essay, with ideas, and you're trying to dismiss them because I can't prove time travel is bunk? If I could prove it I'd be up for a Nobel Prize. And now you're saying the essay contains axioms? When it challenges the axioms you've been pretending to disprove it with? It contains rigourous thinking and logic. And I haven't seen any rigourous thinking and logic to disprove it. Just pretend-science that says "time is a length ergo your essay is wrong QED", and pretend-science that dismisses it as "metaphysics of little merit".

So far, to any counter claim, you have just stated that it disagrees with your claims. This is not debate. If you make a claim, then you need to back it up with evidence, not analogies and opinion. As I have attempted to do, work out what the conclusions to your propositions would be. This is not guessing, but you have to apply rigorous thinking and logic to it. You keep saying you essay means that certain conclusions would come form it, but then contradict your self and say the opposite would be the result.

This is downright dishonest Ed. I explain at great length. You ignore the explanation like you ignore the whole point of the essay. Just as you ignore the evidence. Time is not a length. You cannot move through it. It is always now. The evidence is staring you in the face. And don't pretend that I contradict myself. I don't.

Show me your best bit of "rigourous thinking and logic" to disprove the essay Ed, and I'll explain again why you're wrong. Home in on one particular point so I can nail it down to your acknowledged satisfaction. Do not move off that point until we have resolved it.

Thanks for the link, Spyman. I can empathise with the "experience" here.

I experience the moment "now," or, expressed more accurately, the present sense-experience (Sinnen-Erlebnis) combined with the recollection of (earlier) sense-experiences. That is why the sense-experiences seem to form a series, namely the time-series indicated by "earlier" and "later." The experience-series is thought of as a one-dimensional continuum.

I think he tussled with all this on and off throughout his life. This is from page 73 of ABOUT TIME by Paul Davies:

Einstein himself wasn't to thrilled with the unified spacetime idea at first, dimissing Minkowski's new four-dimensional geometry as "superfluous" pedantry.

Then on page 77 we see:

Even Einstein confessed, near the end of his days, that the problem of the now "worried him seriously." In conversation with the philosopher Rudolf Carnap he conceded that there us "something essential about the now", but expressed the belief that, whatever it was, it lay "just outside the realm of science".

There's another quote somewhere about how he was unhappy with something when he was formulating General Relativity and wished he'd pursued it. So I think he was unhappy with 4D spacetime, then happy, then unhappy. Something like that.

Can we all try not to be a little more pleasant? By all means correct any wrong view and respond to ignorance, but let's not descend into arguments. It happens too much on forums like this.

ParanoiA: Yes, I'm saying photons are not point particles. They aren't waves either. They are what they are. Sometimes they look like waves, sometimes they don't. But that's just us. We always try to describe the subatomic world using something we can see in our macroscopic lives.

OK thanks Zanket, I agreed after I thought it through.

Sorry, but I'm struggling with that introduction to your paper - on how the ball can traverse the vertical length of the rocket in an arbitrarily short time as far as the crew are concerned. If you could rephrase it in some way I'd be grateful.

I'm pissed off today, so i'm going to do a thrashing. Particle may imply volume and mass to you, but be reminded you don't know jack. Just because all we see in day to day life, in our macroscopic scale, has mass and volume, does not mean its the same everywhere. Now if you want to momentum of light, it's not mass times velocity. It's Plank's constant, over its wavelength god damn it. And thinking its a wave doesnt get you out of it, this equation still applies. The mathematics tells us to think of fundamental particles as point particles. No Billiard Balls. In Fact, not volume, takes up so space. They are not intervals in geometry, just points.

Look at this, swansont. It's not on. And I don't care what "mathematics tells us" because real life tells us about long wave radio. Do not defend this supercilious intellectual arrogance with a skim of scientific fact.

Which is exactly what I tried to point out before. It can become scientific once you start making predictions' date=' but the original supposition, by itself, is not.

 

For instance, with the concept of "it's always now," and the observation that when two objects collide, they do it now, how would one predict that beforehand? i.e. come up with the equation that allows me to launch one object and have another intercept it, without using a time variable.[/quote']

 

That's unreasonable, swansont. You know the "show me the maths" issue is in proving the axiom, not in the use of t for calculating trajectories.

 

The burden of furnishing this is upon the proposer.

 

Yes it is. But one has to start somewhere. With an idea. And you're being unreasonable again if you expect me to somehow prove that time travel is impossible. Let's not forget that TIME EXPLAINED is an essay under the "Speculations" heading of an internet forum. It isn't some grand authoritative paper. It isn't String Theory either.

I was doing that as a thought experiment. It is always a good idea to ask "What if?" questions as they can sometimes give understanding to a question. Thought experiments are easily identified as they usually start with either "What if" or "Let us assume".

Before any scientist performs an experiment they essentially go through a thought experiment to determine what the expected results of the experiment that they are doing will be. This is good science as one rarely performs experiments to see what might happen, they are usually done to either confirm or disprove a theory.

Agreed.

This is what I have been attempting to do with you theory. What if it was correct? What would be the expected results?

Attempting maybe, but IMHO you've been trying to disprove my "theory" using the very axioms the essay challenges, and nothing else.

From the information you have given the results disagree with past observations. This is where I got the "Universal Time" from.

No they don't. There's no experimental evidence or observations that disagree with the essay.

In your posts, you have maintained that there is a single "Now" that your theory requires. As in your post that said: Yes, our clocks will be marking time at two different rates. But when we collide, we collide NOW. That's the absolute now, the only now, and it has total significance. However take this situation: You are sitting on the surface of the Sun. You use a radio to tell me that "it is a little warm where you are at the moment". Now I am here on Earth and I receive your radio transmission and send back a message saying that it is "not too bad here on Earth". This all up has taken around 16 minutes by your watch. However, according to the photons that were used, it has all occurred instantaneously. So who's time is the "absolute now, the only now, and it has total significance"? Your clock says that it took 16 minutes where as the clocks that would have been on the photon say that it has not taken any time at all? Which one of those "clocks" represents the "absolute now" that has total significance? In fact, according to the photons my transmission of my message occured at the same time as your transmission of your message, but according to our clocks I transmitted my message 8 minutes after you sent yours. If I had also sent a message after you sent your message to me, but before it reached me, then according to the photons, I sent that message before they were sent. All this completely throws out any possibility of there being an absolute time, as you have stated your theory predicts/requires. If we assume an absolute "Now" then what has been observed would make no sense (and your theory says that it couldn't occur). The fact that this has been seen to occur contradicts your theory, so what is wrong, observation or your theory?

NONE of the clocks record the absolute now. This should be apparent from the colliding clocks example. Regardless of the "passage of time" on my clock, it is always now as far as I am concerned. Regardless of the "passage of time" on your clock, it is always now as far as you are concerned. If we are separated by some large distance, we are unable to share a mutual event that always, for each of us, happens now. There's no contradiction of the essay. And there is no absolute time or universal time either. That's definitely not what I said.

Let's look at this "weak analogy" or "false analogy" matter. Let's look at what I said. Excuse me if I insert the omitted word "concept" on line 2.

Time is very simple, once you get it. But “getting it” is very very difficult. That’s because your current concept of time is so deeply ingrained. You think of time as a length:

 

Q: How long will it take to get to London?

A: What do you mean long?

 

We form a mental map of the world using our senses and our brains. But the map is not the territory. We use time to think, but we’ve grown so accustomed to thinking the way we do, that we don't think about time any more. We don't see time for what it is.

 

But let’s start with something easier. Let’s start with colour. Follow the link below to conduct an experiment:

 

http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/colourPerception/colourPerception.html

 

This demonstrates something important about colour perception. What you thought was yellow is in fact grey. It really is. It isn’t a trick. Tear a small hole in a piece of paper to make your own mask to remove context. Hold it up to one image after the other, and you realise that the effect is genuine. It comes as a shock, but genuine it is. Yellow is grey. What does this tell you? It tells you that colour is perception rather than reality. 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 would see in colour. This should be a reminder that in the subatomic world there is no such thing as colour. A photon has a wavelength, an electromagnetic oscillation, a motion.

 

Next let’s take a look at heat. Put your hand on the griddle and sizzle, you know heat is real. But 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, because junior-level physics tells us that heat is atomic or molecular motion. It’s a “derived effect”, or a macro effect if you prefer. Sure, heat is a real thing. But you know it's motion.

 

Pressure is similar. You can’t measure the pressure of an atom, because pressure isn’t a fundamental property of the sub-atomic world. It’s another ”derived effect”, and the Kinetic Theory of Gases tells us it’s derived from motion.

 

How about Kinetic Energy? A cannonball in space travelling at 1000m/s has Kinetic Energy. Oh sorry. I made a mistake. It isn't the cannonball doing 1000m/s. It's me. So where's the kinetic energy now? Nowhere. Because it's just a mathematical expression of stopping distance. There isn't any. All there is is motion.

 

We’re all familiar with Sound. It’s like light because it’s waves, and like pressure because they’re pressure waves. And when you look beyond this at the molecules that make up the air around us, you see that sound is motion.

 

 

Did you know that smell is really shape? Nevermind, because you should be getting the drift by now. We are accustomed to thinking about the world in terms of how we experience it, rather than the scientific, empirical, fundamental, underlying things that are there. And nowhere is this more so than with Time...

There's no analogies here. What is here are examples of ontological thinking.

Good one JohnB.

ecoli, here's the background:

Do not take this to mean that I think you belong in the loony bin with Farsight...

Is Area 51 real and is the government hiding something from us? Is there any proof of its existence?

Yes, of course. Everybody knows that.

If we take the assumption that space and time are fundamental...

Einstein showed that the faster you travel the more that space and time are rotated into one another...

What you are saying equates to placing a bowling ball on a trampoline and saying that the bowling ball determines what the trampoline is made of.

As I have said, this is a weak analogy because some of the words used have similar meaning...

Ok how about irrelevant content? If it is not supposed to be an analogy, and it has nothing to do with the subject matter, then why include it? How does an analogy, that you have admitted is not applicable to the subject matter, aid in our understanding of the subject?

...

The idea is to show the reader something obvious that's taken for granted, then move on to something a little more difficult. [b']Sadly, some people just don't want to know.[/b]

Farsight, you have an image of a $100 bill. Did you read the fine print? "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". That $100 bill is real money.

It's not real money. It's just a piece of paper that says "I am real money".

Most money is in accounts of some sort. If it is in a US bank, the account is insured by the US government. Other countries have similar concepts. Just because you can't touch it, feel it, smell it doesn't mean it isn't real. People who play funny games with a bank's balance sheets tend to find how real that money was.

Money only "exists" only because people agree it "exists". Like insane-alien says, take away the people and the money's gone too.

Farsight, you are far too enamored with analogies. Analogies are very helpful in making strange new concepts seem familiar. However, one can easily get caught in a false analogy if the analogy is extended too far. This has happened to you more than once.

When have I been caught in a false analogy? In fact, What analogy? I don't think Money is the same as Energy. It's like I didn't say Colour is the same as Time in TIME EXPLAINED. The idea is to show the reader something obvious that's taken for granted, then move on to something a little more difficult. Sadly, some people just don't want to know.

There you go again, DH. You leap on the lack of a billiard ball and ignore an issue that affects generations of schoolchildren whilst skating over the first line of the dictionary definition:

1. A very small piece or part; a tiny portion or speck.

I point out an issue and get a pile of insults like "looney" and "hypocrite". You know full well Edtharan tried to use a dictionary definition I quoted on a side issue to make out I was contradicting my own essay. This tendency you've got for dishonesty and offense is not how physics ought to be.

ParanoiA: The word particle does imply mass to many younger people, which is the problem that earned me a kicking. However I'd say most people on these boards are happy with the idea of massless particles, and don't associate particles with mass. But I think some do still associate a particle with a speck. Ask DH to explain how long a long-wave photon can be, why it cannot be cut in half, and why David Deutsch thinks a photon in two places at once proves the existence of a Multiverse. The way to grasp the problem here is to yell OI! and then try to make any sense of the SHOUT particle.

Well sadly you're wrong. That's exactly what it does mean to whole generations of schoolchildren.

http://www.answers.com/topic/particle

What next? Will you be telling all and sundry that anybody who doesn't like the sound of "coloured" quarks clearly knows no mathematics, even less physics, invents language and axioms, and eats children for breakfast?

Geddoutofit.

The above was the intro to ENERGY EXPLAINED, but it made the overall essay too long. So I've split it out. It's just a bit of "out of the box" fun really, but I hope it's interesting fun that demonstrates just how much we take for granted.

MONEY EXPLAINED

I know this might not sound like physics, but bear with me, because Time is Money, isn't it?

Show me some money, I say. So you pull out a £10 note. We both know that’s money right?

Wrong. Check the small print: “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds”.

Your tenner isn’t really money. It’s what’s known in the trade as a promissary note. A mere promise to pay money. Basically it’s an IOU, but from the Bank of England. OK if you’re in the States or Oz maybe you don’t get the small print, but your buck or buckaroo is still a promissary note, a mere IOU, it’s not really money.

OK you say. How about this here penny? You hand it to me. I turn it over in my hand. It’s coppery and shiny. New. Freshly minted. But what is it? It’s a piece of stamped metal. Nowadays it's copper plated steel, but there’s been all sort of variations involving copper tin and zinc, usually alloyed as a bronze.

I could make them in my garage. But it isn’t worth it, especially “Since May 2006, all circulation Canadian pennies from 1942 to 1996 have an intrinsic value of over $0.02 USD based on the increasing spot price of copper in the commodity markets...” Anyhow, a penny is similar to the milk tokens I remember from when I was a kid. And those useless slot-machine tokens I brought home from Blackpool. That shiny new penny is just a glorified milk token, acceptable to more than just the milkman. And what notes and coins are is cash. Money tokens. They aren’t really money. We have to forget about cash.

Where do you keep your money? I ask you. In the Bank you reply. Where in the Bank? I say. In the vault, you say. To which I say: But that’s not money, that's just cash. You change tack and tell me your money isn’t in the vault. It’s in your account. You’ve got your salary going into your bank account every month. Whoa. Where is this account? I say. In the bank, you say. Where in the bank? I say. On the computer, you say. I could say "Where on the computer?" but I won't. Because now we’re getting somewhere. Your money is just intangible information, maybe on a computer somewhere. Before they had computers your money was in a ledger. It was just a bit of inky writing in a big black book. With as much real existence as a bit and a byte and a bar tab. And every month your employer tells your bank to reduce his glorified bar tab and increase yours.

Did you get that? Money is just a glorified bar tab. An agreement about IOUs. Nothing is moving into anywhere, or out of anywhere else. Ah, I can hear you saying, what about the gold standard? Shrug. Gold was only “money” because everybody agreed that this nice and shiny metal was worth having. So were pretty little sea shells once upon a time. Imagine a pirate landing on a deserted island, the native people wiped out by some pestilence. The pirate kicks amongs the ruins, hawking and spitting at finding only sea shells and no gold. Because there isn’t any money if people don’t agree that its money. Because money doesn’t exist. Not really. That’s why when you spend money it doesn’t disappear. It isn’t destroyed. You’ve got less of it, and the shop’s got more, but nobody’s really got more or less of anything. It’s just a bar tab. Do you know how money is created? Governments allow banks to lend money to people who build houses and cars and flatscreen TVs that everybody agrees are valuable. Then the money that was magicked out of nowhere really does exist. But it doesn’t really exist because it was never really created in the first place. But it does. And it doesn't. But it gets things done, and it makes the world go round, and everybody wants it.

Doesn’t really exist. Doesn’t get created or destroyed. Makes the world go round. Everybody wants it.

Does that remind you of anything?

Does that remind you of Energy?

Oh yes, I can explain Energy.

Yes the value for C is a constant, but this in no way proves that velocity is more fundamental than time.

Ed, if I could prove it I'd be getting phone calls from this mob:

http://nobelprize.org/nomination/physics/

Actually, it is not just my velocity that determines my time experience. Gravity also determines my time experience...

Yep, I've been thinking hard about that. Real hard Ed.

If there is a Set C and the components of that Set are Set A and Set B, then C can not be a component of Set A or Set B. It is logically impossible (unless you are talking about recursion, and that would produce infinities...

Hah. You get recursion your way. People talk about "the speed of light" even though "speed" alters distance and time and speed is distance over time. And the photon sees those infinities you mentioned.

How then can you equate our perception of Time to these other perceptions? These other perceptions have a physical and physiological effect that we can measure in the nervous systems. We haven't been able to do that for Time...

I didn't. I've already told you about the big difference between perceiving colour and experiencing time. You perceive colour. You experience heat. You experience time. But you can't travel through heat or time.

How about this one guys:

http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=10697

I think "particle" is such a bad word though, insane_alien. IMHO it makes people think of some discrete, distinct, "billiard ball" zipping through space, and makes them think about the properties of billiard balls and not the properties of space.

This is something that's bugged me a little bit recently. We all know that according the relativity, the speed of light is constant to all observers. The question is, why light only? There certainly are other particles (most of them theoretical) that travel at the speed of light, like gravitons. Would their speed also be constant to all observers?

IMHO: A photon might be hundreds of metres long, as per long wave radio, so I don't like thinking of it as a "particle". I prefer to think of it as a self-propagating electromagnetic variation in space, or a "space effect" for short. Now instead of asking "Why does a photon travel at the speed of light?" you can ask "Why does a space effect propagate at the rate that it does?". The answer is to do with the properties of space. When it comes to gravitons (see DH's note) I'm definitely thinking "space effect" rather than "particle", and a propagation rate that again depends upon the properties of space. Since we hope that all the "forces" can be unified, it seems reasonable to expect the same propagation rate.