05/27 Open Thread: Seeing Time

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clock_sync

Since reality is a construct, at some level based on our perceptions, can altering those perceptions change reality? Is that even a meaningful question? Tweaking one's perceptions is a thing, and just how much does it pervade art and art history? And how about tweaking them to better reflect the more nuanced and complex model, the standard model, derived from centuries of theorizing, experimentation and study. What is it to see photons themselves, tiny, huge, poly-spherical, delimited yet fuzzy and overlapping into near infinitudes from anything but the most micro infinitesimal of point sources. How about temporal photons? What even to call them? More importantly, are they properly part of the model or just a computational gimmick of sorts needed to fill out the table of natural units?

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I'm going to segue to my comment in smiley7's column of Saturday 05/09/2020, but I need to note first that it is at the edges heh

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Yet another day here surrounded by tasks and time; an interesting perceptual-conceptual experiment with experience. My familiar office space, my desk, supplies, notes, keyboard, mouse, pens, paper and pseudo-randomized clutter is a hyper thin gel of "solids", photons, energy, and time; time as if little photons of temporal distance to anything and everything in it. When one moves one leaves a wake in both the spatial "ether" and the temporal one, like tracks in a cloud chamber, each track some sort of "was", a thing as real as the event that occurred there, totally analogous the more I work at it to the tracks in such a chamber. Because universes scale, the potentiality is as vast as the whole world outside. Can the vision itself scale? How much effort will it take to maintain it.

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So I interrupt this narrative to quick refill my coffee and divert to go out and fill the platform feeder with a brief digression to pull weeds out of the elevated planter box in which the bay tree grows. There is a fork there, divert to weed and consume temporal distance in one spot, limiting the total spatial distance I will be able to travel during this excursion or no? I diverted because why not, I have no need to maintain an average velocity or speed.

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Something something something about a life unexamined, but all the same this is bizarre, though strangely interesting and entertaining. Ah well, other forks lie ahead, as near as my reach, and even more beyond my office door and the corvid chorus outside is in full croak, so I think I will again divert.

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(As an aside, I cannot but wonder how much dissociation is good for one, and who is to say? But that is another matter.)

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This is all taking me back to some time in '67 or '68 when I played around with all the equations I could find from which I could algebraically derive time and covered a large surface with them and their combinations and their final reduction, in every case to something of the form t=(...), but hilariously enough time is as simple as paying attention whilst returning my breakfast dishes from the office to the kitchen and then diverting to take out the compostable green waste there accumulated before returning to, again, divert to something else. Somewhere I have, or once had a discarded window from a bubble chamber, micro-crazed with a multiplicity of multiply forked tracks of exactly what? Time is as good as any other answer in a very real sense just as our existence, minute to minute is nothing but a vast cascade of forks, those taken and those ahead, webs of potentiality, circumscribed here about me like Mephistopheles' Hell such that it is impossible not to take a fork, less travelled or not, because even stasis is a choice.

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So, I said above that it is at the edges. Hard edges, all of them, but, if you look just right, all with borders of distortion such that the background color and intensity is slightly muted as if by diffraction, as if the foreground thing had an imperfectly transparent aura of decreasing intensity according to some sort of inverse square law that could easily be the spatio-temporal uncertainty of the visual edge as a collection of point sources; of, the model says, atoms, but as perceived, again per the model, of photons, but what of the temporal element. You can derive innumerable formulas for time, but they only show how it is computed, or, more correctly, how phenomena deemed to be functions of time or time dependent are computed. Thus, velocity, v, is computed as distance, d, over time, t, as follows v=d/t. Simple algebra converts this into t=d/v, but does that actually tell us anything whatsoever about time? Possibly, but only in a limited sense..

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I was told at a very young age that there were really four dimensions, not three. I was also not given much detail or explanation of any of what that meant or implied. As you grow and age you start to get it; three regular (spatial) dimensions tell us the size of stuff, and later we learn that they also tell us location. We measure them. So time fits right in, we measure it too, but with clocks instead of rulers. We measure how long something takes or how long something lasts, and there we are. Except, at some point somebody throws in coordinate systems of one, two or three axes, all mutually perpendicular and then tells you that, clearly, by analogy, time, the fourth dimension must lie along some axis mutually perpendicular to the other three? Huh? You can't grok that, can't visualize it, probably because we don't experience time as directly or in the same fashion as to experience space, maybe. I have written on that specific topic and am still not really certain of it. We really can't fathom how four sets of axes can all be mutually perpendicular, so we default to three plus the clock. To me, however, it seems that time is all pervasive, not some separate linear measure, but like a fog, or somehow spherical. If you are travelling North, time goes with you, and being as seemingly mono-directional as it seems to be, increments in the Northerly direction. But, hang a left and run out West and time flows right along with you, incrementing out to the West. A trip up in an elevator finds time following you up and incrementing in the vertical direction. No matter which spatial dimension you follow, time is there, accompanying you and incrementing as you go, or so you think. Heh. Not quite.

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While I am heading North, with my own time and timepiece marking, measuring and incrementing my time ever Northerly, somebody passes me heading South with their own time and timepiece marking, measuring and incrementing their time ever Sourtherly. Oops. So we need to provide for any direction time on any axis which makes time, once again amorphous. A few more points, The Newtonian universe is gone. There are no directions in space, no fixed points nor any any axes or origin from which to plot any points. There are no fixed rulers with which to measure distance, because distance varies with velocity and is never the same for the observer and the cargo or passenger. By the same token, time also varies with velocity and is also never the same for the observer and the passenger. The amount of time dilation and linear compression can be computed, but it has to be computed relative to something and given that there are no fixed points or standard rulers, these computations must be made relative to some prior state of the system in question. Beyond that, it turns out that there is, sadly, no such thing as simultaneity. So really, the best we can do is some amorphous all pervasive intangible that nonetheless permeates everything, and if you turn, really, really, really quickly, you just might see the tracks that you leave in it..

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be well and have a good one

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Title Image is : clock_sync

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It's an open thread, so have at it. The floor is yours
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mimi's picture

professional education?

Kudos. I kind of adore those, but seldom understand what they say or calculate. Just that:

There are no directions in space, no fixed points nor any any axes or origin from which to plot any points. There are no fixed rulers with which to measure distance, because distance varies with velocity and is never the same for the observer and the cargo or passenger. By the same token, time also varies with velocity and is also never the same for the observer and the passenger.

is so beautifully said and makes a lot of sense too, at least to me. Thanks.

Isn't this blog a great place to read, learn, and laugh?

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enhydra lutris's picture

@mimi
career in science in my youth and have somehow always hobnobbed with the occasional professional scientists. I have retained a serious interest in such things, have read and studied much, and try to keep vaguely abreast of it. Though it was never my career, my focus and avocation for most of my life has been epistemology, the theory of knowledge, including not only what we know and how, but what we can and cannot know, with a side order of logic and methodology.

And, yes, this is a great place to learn and laugh, at least for me too.

be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Azazello's picture

@enhydra lutris
Hash-pipe philosopher in the late 60s, "Wow man, heavy", leading to formal study and the piece of paper, eventually. The main question that has always motivated me is Whence, that is, where do these ideas come from, why do people believe what they do ? I'm still investigating this but it turns out to have a pretty simple answer, in the post-war US anyway, it's the picture-box.

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

enhydra lutris's picture

@Azazello @Azazello

I had a dual major and Cal converted to the quarter system in 66, so, with 2 majors and the movement, I just kept truckin' on. In my senior year it was pointed out to me that the pre-requisite for Philosophy had changed from 1a & 1b to 1a, b, and c. So I went to the dept head and noted that I had completed the full major, which they let me do, because, for all practical purposes, I had met that requirement, and he said I could enroll in the masters program without it, but no BA without it. So, I said no thanx and took my other piece of paper and beat it on down the line.

Hash-pipe philosopher in the late 60s

Heh, took one of my finals on acid, aesthetics, as I recall. Have no idea what I said, but the prof loved the hell out of it.

And yeah, the box sux. Kill your TV!

be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

lotlizard's picture

@enhydra lutris  
They even wanted to hire me, but I just couldn’t make my mind up to move back to the U.S., to North Carolina.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@lotlizard

a trip.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

smiley7's picture

@enhydra lutris @enhydra lutris

old friends ... as tar heels. Smile

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lotlizard's picture

@enhydra lutris  
— well, to the extent that you can call a PMC (professional-managerial class) job “country life,” when you’re commuting five days a week from rural N.C. to a corporate HQ in the “Research Triangle” (Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill).

A Deng Xiaoping capitalist roader by day, a fish-out-of-water intellectual sent to the countryside to learn from the peasantry by night? Only in America!

Sharing a farm with friends, with all the idyllically happy upsides and hardscrabble downsides, my path through life for the last 25 years would have been very different.

Edited to add: As some readers may recall, I seriously considered joining Svanholm, a Danish intentional community / farm commune that owns an entire village. But I never got up the gumption to clear the hurdle of learning Danish.

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Lookout's picture

A heady topic today, el. Moving like molasses or light? Dependent on perception and speed, pleasure and pain, young or old...

Earth bound the plants use daylength to find their place in the yearly progression. The moon keys the timing of the tides and perhaps more. Sun and moon creating the dance of human time experience.

Stones of Stenness and Barnhouse (15).jpg

Our tribal ancestors had better appreciation of their relationship to earth's patterns and march of time. In this time, many cultures have lost the tie to Gaia...including our own.

I love this '66 version of Pete's song
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qURAnrk30ng]

Thanks for the OT. Y'all have a good one!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

enhydra lutris's picture

@Lookout

Our tribal ancestors had better appreciation of their relationship to earth's patterns and march of time.

But that was partly out of necessity and the need for predictability, to the extent possible, with respect to the tides, snows, monsoons and celestial apparitions.

Today, for the record, is 13 baktun, 0 katun, 7 tun, 9 uinal, 14 k'in according to a most remarkable calendar that has been running smoothly without intercalary days and Julian or Gregorian corrections since the time of Noah's daddy (or grand-daddy, I forget which).

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Okay, so time out

Is time a constant? Defined by the speed of light? Would time be different with a different constant, that we haven't discovered yet? Is it possible to change our perception of time if the science changes? Would we need to switch to the metric system? Is time a biological constant or a mechanical constant? Are we traveling through time right now or just decaying at a fixed rate?

Finally, at the start of our universe I've read there were no laws of physics as we know it. If there is another big bang, and time wasn't one of the properties created, what would that universe look like to us?

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enhydra lutris's picture

@Snode
interesting question. Time isn't defined by the speed of light, but the speed of light does impose a constraint on it, maybe. I thought about bringing that into the discussion, but I thought that the wee dip into relativity was enough for today. It is because velocity is limited to c that time dilation occurs.

Should you wish to probe deeper, you have go head down the quantum rabbit hole, which I may do some day, or maybe leave here dangling for Price Rip to grab and run with. AT any rate, there is a mathematical boundary to our world defined by something called the Planck length, which is equal to 1.616255×10−35 m (6.3631×10−34 in). If we were to divide that length by c (c? si!) in keeping with the equation t=d/v, we get a known known as Planck time which describes an interval of about 5.39×10−44 s. The problem is, that this is quantum reality, and it is a bit wonky. The Planck length is not the smallest imaginable length, but merely the smallest measurable one. It might be meaningless to discuss half of a Planck length, because such a thing cannot be discerned, but that is another issue. When we wander over to time we get more grief. The Planck time is possibly just computational jiggery pokery to round out the table of natural measurements. If not, is time "photonic", little discrete, discontinuous drops of time? Doesn't Zeno's paradox lurk down that road? Etc.

Be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@enhydra lutris For you, I will walk the Planck. I will definitely make the time for it.

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Lookout's picture

@enhydra lutris

SI Second (atomic second) - The interval of time taken to complete 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the cesium 133 atom exposed to a suitable excitation.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/atomic-clock3.htm

Hope you're having good vibes!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

detour in my intended route to stop by here and encounter some ideas I wasn't thinking about at the moment. Another fork. Now I'm off on another trajectory. Back in time? This was not on my mind.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@randtntx
for the video.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

lotlizard's picture

… caused by the British Empire switching over to the Gregorian calendar from the Julian, in that month.

https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=1752&country=1

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enhydra lutris's picture

@lotlizard
And then there are events and holidays that are "oc", old calendar, such as October 13.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

RantingRooster's picture

we humans will discover there is a physics we haven't discovered yet. Assuming of course we don't fork ourselves before that time.

[video:https://youtu.be/MQSZR3NSqm8]

I think we only have a short amount of time.

[video:https://youtu.be/2ObjtVdsV3I]

Does time really exist, or is it our "memory" that creates time from the every present, relentless, NOW.

Why does time seem to slow down when you're in the middle of a car wreck or plane crash etc? Is time playing tricks on us? Is gravity "bending" time during a wreck to make things slow down?

If time was created during the big bang, what came before? The complete absence of everything, is still something, ie no thing or nothing, so something, ie no thing, existed before. What ever "it" was that existed before, was it solid or empty or some other state of "being" before the big bang?

Do you ever lose time? Where did it go? Why can't I seem to find time when I need her? Maybe in time I'll figure it out, if I don't get forked in the process!

Drinks

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C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote

enhydra lutris's picture

@RantingRooster
comment. One:

Does time really exist, or is it our "memory" that creates time from the every present, relentless, NOW.

was the subject of a whole column I wrote a while back, prompted by an article somebody else wrote, which was linked and cited. The proposition is, or was, and perhaps yet will be "do we ever directly experience time, in the now, or piece it together from memories, and particularly, those of predictions made?" or something like that.

That whole conundrum plus all those times when the clock seems to stop during crises inevitably leads one to question whether or not it is truly something external, or a creation of our neuro-metabolic processes.

be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

studentofearth's picture

In the field and garden measured by task completed
In the kitchen task and fragrance from the oven
At work project to project
When working with a client billable 15 minute episodes
Conference call exact minutes in their time zone
C99 time floats by

oops, need to get out to the fields before it gets too hot
Thanks for the thoughts to ponder

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Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.

enhydra lutris's picture

@studentofearth

and c99 adrift with an unknown wavelength. The hot is upon us here too, have been out to the yard and back a few times already and need to get back out myself.

be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

smiley7's picture

So enjoy your morning percolation. Thank you.

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?

There was no Nature. No
them. No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf or if

the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up to what we were
— when we were ocean and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was? before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All everything home

SINGULARITY ~ Marie Howe
(after Stephen Hawking)

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enhydra lutris's picture

@smiley7
poem. In the beginning, just after the singularity was undifferentiated time-energy-space-matter, and in the ever so distant future they say we will again see the undifferentiated miasma that they call the heat death, but what then of Higgs?

be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

magiamma's picture

@smiley7
We had to leave the planet or we would die. Thought he was nuts at the time. Heh.

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smiley7's picture

@magiamma

One might say "tickets purchased for everyone, only Vegas knows the time."

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magiamma's picture

@smiley7
I’ll check in with Sheldon and let you know.

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smiley7's picture

@magiamma

In the meantime, before the end of time ... in case you missed these WHO positions this morning:

World Health Organization (WHO)

"Yesterday, 40 million health professionals sent a letter to the leaders of each of the @g20org nations, calling for a healthy and green recovery from #COVID19. I fully support this"-@DrTedros

You will have to scroll down to this morning on WHO's twitter to see all the good enviromental tweets or find them on the Guardian's live blog easier scrolling down and going backwards a page, here, as i write: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/may/27/coronavirus-live-news...

Ta.

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wendy davis's picture

@magiamma

than any visitors who came to earth from other dimensions, multiverses would not be here as explorers, but as hostiles. yanno, like 'the borg'? "resistance is futile; we will assimilate you..."

pffft on that, imo.

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magiamma's picture

@wendy davis
No need to look further

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wendy davis's picture

@magiamma

depending on what you mean. i'm not entirely kidding when i say i've imagined that the only thing that might reverse climate chaos at this point might be that benevolent visitors from other worlds might have the technology to suck the CO2 out of the earth's atmosphere then render it harmless to their ship/s and those on board.

there may have been a momentary pause, but most of the planet runs on fossil fuels, and even the 'green fixes' have their own carbon footprints.

now we can all wish that the indigenous eco-socialists' warnings had been heeded long ago, but it wasn't to be. and they collectively tried so very hard to show us the way, even at the Rio-2012 Sustainability Conference, but they were shut out: the damned interlopers!

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enhydra lutris's picture

@magiamma

will anyway, though I've also felt that we could prolong our existence as a species a bit by bailing on this planet and, naturally, felt myself wondering if that, when all is said and done, would actually be a good thing or not.

BTW - scorching here the past couple of days, you?

be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

magiamma's picture

@enhydra lutris
Always 10 degrees hotter in scotts valley and often more over the hill. Maybe more across the bay. So it’s 78 now which is hot for here at this time of year. Still cool at night. But the trees are dry. Very dry.

Be well.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@magiamma

hills disrupt the breezes and Bay Effect. Another range further East and temps jump up another 5 to 10 degrees.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

wendy davis's picture

that a subset of the theory of relativity maintains: 'as one ages, time really does go faster.

bingling this a.m. i'd discovered that it really is jut the perception, all the various reasons, etc. and i'd forgotten to grab the link, but you'll know it already.

a number of years ago i'd watched some, maybe most of the Nova series 'the Elegant Universe' (

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enhydra lutris's picture

@wendy davis
embedded.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

wendy davis's picture

@enhydra lutris

interested in a bit more from that great series, this is 'the Quantum Café'

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2CGXRcVFwE]

which is part of the longer 'Einstein's Dream': (string theory gets a pretty out there, but has or had...it's adherents.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSSqVVIS874]

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magiamma's picture

et al

the womb of time
“lies” in interspace
between singing electrons
spinning
we travel betwixt unraveling
threads finely hanging
unknowingly

Yeah it’s a mystery. Take good care and have a good one.

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

Except, at some point somebody throws in coordinate systems of one, two or three axes, all mutually perpendicular and then tells you that, clearly, by analogy, time, the fourth dimension must lie along some axis mutually perpendicular to the other three? Huh? You can't grok that, can't visualize it, probably because we don't experience time as directly or in the same fashion as to experience space, maybe.

Never made any sense to me either - more like strict Einsteinians trying their damnedest to shoehorn a standard measure of time into their matter construct. Trouble is the time rate between objects (or in this case three separate directional vectors) doesn't exist on a linear scale - as you point out there is no such thing as objective, non-relative time - so imprinting an identical time rate onto each of the directional three vectors is too simplistic and hence doesn't reveal accurate results once applied to (most) objects that do not enjoy the same time rate.

If we take any ray in a three dimensional coordinate plane (x,y,z), the ray is made up of three different directions and magnitudes (speed), so due to time dilation each vector's rate of time is also different - both from a outside party perspective (that observes from its own time rate) as well as from the perspective of each of the other vectors.

So instead of one time rate (call it Tr) applied to (x,y,z) , we actually need to apply varying time rates to each of the coordinates separately (xTr1, yTr2, zTr3) before we can properly calculate the effect of time on the ray's motion.

So in essence Time is not a single, constant fourth dimension but rather a variable property inherent in each of the other vectors individually.

That's my theory and I'm sticking with it.

Drinks

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

enhydra lutris's picture

@Not Henry Kissinger

time vector to any point (x,y,z) will seemingly resolve to a vector from the origin to the target point along the "shortest distance" ray to that point from the origin, but of a length independent of the length of said ray.

Ages ago a buddy taught me an ever so useful cheat which is that almost everything is invariant under rotation and translation of a coordinate system. If you carry your own coordinate system within yourself, you can usually rotate it in such fashion as to to eliminate a lot of bothersome extraneous variables and computations. You can even use translation as part of the process, so long as you are really fully able to compute the path out and back. For example, you have a problem concerning a system of masses. Well, somewhere there is a resultant, ride it and all the relativistic effects not along the x axis fall out. The instantaneous moment around several axes is simply the moment around the resultant axis.

It's a companion axiom to knowing where your towel is, "keep your coordinates about you". Wink

be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

imagine, so we have only to conceive something and it has already happened. We are attached to everything else by a line of thought, so travel across the multiversity is instantaneous. Consciousness is ever expanding, but loops back in an infinity of paths to the present moment. This moment is the Big Bang of our shared awareness.

Thinking is the Best Way to Travel. It's all a song waiting to be written as an equation.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ma1bmBv_nc]

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enhydra lutris's picture

@leveymg

Thanks.

be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

wendy davis's picture

@leveymg

a great addition.

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Hawkfish's picture

Apparently there is a way to reformulate GR so that time is absolute and simultaneity can be defined (“shape dynamics”). As I understand it, the idea is that things actually change size when there is relative motion.

With absolute time, you can then turn everything around and get space as an emergent property, and causality is the fundamental reality. Smolin discusses this very accessibly in his book Time Reborn.

This approach also plays well with Whitehead’s quantum ontology, which Henry Stapp discusses (somewhat opaquely - he needs an editor) in his book Mindful Universe. The idea here is that quantum events are not just physical but also informational.

I like these approaches in part because I find any description of time that doesn’t explain NOW to be seriously deficient. Claiming it is an illusion seems wrong to me because an illusion in a materialist model is just a persistent neural pattern in your world line and that still doesn’t explain why we are here on that line instead of there.

A friend of mine said this idea reminded him of the opening of Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, where the main character is described as being “unstuck in time”. I think that shows how difficult it is to treat time as something static and eternal. It also might bring back free will.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@Hawkfish
shape dynamics.

FWIW, free will never left the building, though it might have to be an affirmation and/or act of will.

be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

smiley7's picture

the coffee. Been a great day.

In evening, arrived here ...

When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable. ~ René Descartes

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enhydra lutris's picture

@smiley7
Descartes given that he committed the fallacy of petitio principe when he pulled god out of a hat in order to prop up his cogito. The ultimate deus ex machina, as it were.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --