Science5 mins ago
"space/time Continuum" Maybe
39 Answers
Hardly a question but :
Due to totally overwhelming demand in naomi24's Water Divining thread, (well 2 requests actually) here is a basic description of an alternative view of time I mulled over.
Rather hoping I'm not expected to defend it to death since I mull over many different ways to look at things, especially when I have a pint in my hand. But if folk want to discuss pros and cons, weaknesses and strengths, then be my guest.
In a similar way as a photon (or whatever) in Quantum Physics is considered to take every single possible path when travelling from one point to another, I'm wondering if time has a not so different existence. That all possible points in time exist, in some form, at all/the same time(s).
Consider an individual's life. At all moments in time where they exist, they are experiencing that moment. What is the present moment for them. (For ever for want of a better way to put it. I accept there is difficulty using descriptions of passage of time when trying to say it all is there at once, but I hope the meaning is clear enough without having to defined the descriptions used.)
Somehow the individual's memory holds a collection of moments that could have lead up to the moment being experienced. They need not had done so, as all "past" moments that reach the present one is equally valid. Any path through the collection of moments, works. This would give the individual at that point in time the illusion of time flowing. They recall what they would believe to be their past.
This has consequences. Agreeing for the sake of discussion to agree all points in time do exist at once, then one can conceive of the occasional flaw in the normal situation where only "past" moments are recalled, and the mind gets access to "memory" of possible "future" moments instead.
Thus one consequence is that seeing the future becomes a possibility.
(Oh and experiencing a memory of a present or recently past moment you ought not normally have expected to be aware of works just as well.)
Due to totally overwhelming demand in naomi24's Water Divining thread, (well 2 requests actually) here is a basic description of an alternative view of time I mulled over.
Rather hoping I'm not expected to defend it to death since I mull over many different ways to look at things, especially when I have a pint in my hand. But if folk want to discuss pros and cons, weaknesses and strengths, then be my guest.
In a similar way as a photon (or whatever) in Quantum Physics is considered to take every single possible path when travelling from one point to another, I'm wondering if time has a not so different existence. That all possible points in time exist, in some form, at all/the same time(s).
Consider an individual's life. At all moments in time where they exist, they are experiencing that moment. What is the present moment for them. (For ever for want of a better way to put it. I accept there is difficulty using descriptions of passage of time when trying to say it all is there at once, but I hope the meaning is clear enough without having to defined the descriptions used.)
Somehow the individual's memory holds a collection of moments that could have lead up to the moment being experienced. They need not had done so, as all "past" moments that reach the present one is equally valid. Any path through the collection of moments, works. This would give the individual at that point in time the illusion of time flowing. They recall what they would believe to be their past.
This has consequences. Agreeing for the sake of discussion to agree all points in time do exist at once, then one can conceive of the occasional flaw in the normal situation where only "past" moments are recalled, and the mind gets access to "memory" of possible "future" moments instead.
Thus one consequence is that seeing the future becomes a possibility.
(Oh and experiencing a memory of a present or recently past moment you ought not normally have expected to be aware of works just as well.)
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Assuming a (near ?) infinite number of "future" points in time, I don't see whether we have 5 or 105 years of life expectation ahead of us makes much difference to how many flashes of future events we would be likely to experience.
How the path through the points of time is forced such as to appear as an arrow of time to a sentient being, is an exercise left to the reader.
Thanks bert, I'll surf over & check it out.
How the path through the points of time is forced such as to appear as an arrow of time to a sentient being, is an exercise left to the reader.
Thanks bert, I'll surf over & check it out.
I don't know, but I can make an educated guess. There is a difference between those that is worth appreciating, and again that difference is wrapped in the language of probability. Besides, I said only that it was unlikely. It's not impossible, but it's certainly very unlikely.
The history of physics is, like I said before, better and better approximations, but very rarely do old approximations turn out to be utterly wrong. They are just not quite as right.
The history of physics is, like I said before, better and better approximations, but very rarely do old approximations turn out to be utterly wrong. They are just not quite as right.
I'm unconvinced about free will anyway, even if I could find a decent definition of it. However if there is an infinite number of moments you could conceivably chose your own path through them, somehow, to select the life you wish to experience. Or maybe the better way of looking at it is that you experience them all anyway.
Up to now, I've always gone along with the accepted notion of "3 dimensions plus time" and never given it a second thought, until now.
Logically, the time element is constrained to be a straight line, like the others.
For time to be described in terminology implying shape - the fanciful notion of time being like a tangled mess of spaghetti, which I mentioned in the other thread, or your concept of an arrangement of 'moments', through which one navigates - require additional dimensions for time's phenomena to exist in or for the experiencer to move through.
The next question would be whether {the dimensions in which time has 'shape'} are in addition to the 3 dimensions of space we are all familiar with or one and the same.
To save typing, I'll just say "Red Shift" and go awa and have a think about the implications.
Logically, the time element is constrained to be a straight line, like the others.
For time to be described in terminology implying shape - the fanciful notion of time being like a tangled mess of spaghetti, which I mentioned in the other thread, or your concept of an arrangement of 'moments', through which one navigates - require additional dimensions for time's phenomena to exist in or for the experiencer to move through.
The next question would be whether {the dimensions in which time has 'shape'} are in addition to the 3 dimensions of space we are all familiar with or one and the same.
To save typing, I'll just say "Red Shift" and go awa and have a think about the implications.
@naomi,
OG's post appeared, to me, to have been constructed with the purpose of creating an explanation for the ability to experience events which have yet to occur (deja vu, premonition, etc.). For these to work, as advertised, information has to pass from the future to the present. My opinion is that this means events are predestined and thus we are robbed of 'free will'. It reduces us to mere automata in a machine which plays out chains of events.
I would like to think that life is like being the metal ball rolling and bouncing down the pinboard. I would not like to think that life is about being railroaded, powerless to change one's destiny.
OG's post appeared, to me, to have been constructed with the purpose of creating an explanation for the ability to experience events which have yet to occur (deja vu, premonition, etc.). For these to work, as advertised, information has to pass from the future to the present. My opinion is that this means events are predestined and thus we are robbed of 'free will'. It reduces us to mere automata in a machine which plays out chains of events.
I would like to think that life is like being the metal ball rolling and bouncing down the pinboard. I would not like to think that life is about being railroaded, powerless to change one's destiny.
It's true, to some extent, that whenever you have a situation where the future influences the past, that messes up free will. In science terms, it messes up causality, as I mentioned earlier. Having said that, I don't know if it matters to much. Even if you were bound to some fixed path, with no way of leaving it, you might have the illusion of choice, and that could well be indistinguishable from the real thing.
I don't believe that this is the case, but something I was keen to avoid earlier was rejecting OG's idea because it could be uncomfortable for free will. Or even Causality, which is a principle that so far holds up to every test, but is just a principle and may turn out to be violated. However, while it's not difficult to construct models where causality is violated, they turn out to be essentially useless, because there's no predictive power. That is something that is potentially more troubling. But first, causality would need to be violated in the visible Universe, which seems not to be the case.
I don't believe that this is the case, but something I was keen to avoid earlier was rejecting OG's idea because it could be uncomfortable for free will. Or even Causality, which is a principle that so far holds up to every test, but is just a principle and may turn out to be violated. However, while it's not difficult to construct models where causality is violated, they turn out to be essentially useless, because there's no predictive power. That is something that is potentially more troubling. But first, causality would need to be violated in the visible Universe, which seems not to be the case.
Causality can sometimes -appear- to go out of the window, even with standard Newtonian laws.
Would someone like to be the first person I have corresponded with who has actually read Gleick beyond chapter 1?
There was a chapter about a computer simulation of predator/prey population variations (easy to recreate in Excel) which was a classic case of needing to know what the situation was last year, in order to predict what this year is likely to be like whilst pointing out the difficulty of saying what things would be like a given number of years in the future. A simple 'law' but a complex output.
Another chapter about the three body problem, 'strange attractors' and systems where the physical laws are simple to express but the behaviour displayed is chaotic and there is no obvious repetition over the span of many millions of calculation iterations.
* * * Interlude * * *
http://
Would someone like to be the first person I have corresponded with who has actually read Gleick beyond chapter 1?
There was a chapter about a computer simulation of predator/prey population variations (easy to recreate in Excel) which was a classic case of needing to know what the situation was last year, in order to predict what this year is likely to be like whilst pointing out the difficulty of saying what things would be like a given number of years in the future. A simple 'law' but a complex output.
Another chapter about the three body problem, 'strange attractors' and systems where the physical laws are simple to express but the behaviour displayed is chaotic and there is no obvious repetition over the span of many millions of calculation iterations.
* * * Interlude * * *
http://
Hypo -- I think you might be confusing causality with determinism in that post. Just because we cannot track a cause does not mean that there isn't one -- or, perhaps more precisely, while you may not be able to predict the future of a system given laws that describe its behaviour, the system may still be causal: because although you cannot see what comes next, you can at least know that it will depend solely on what is happening now.
@jim
//I think you might be confusing causality with determinism in that post. //
Probably. I know certain words have a much tighter definition within the scientific domain than their typical, colloquial uses.
All I was trying to get across is that it is possible to look at the universe, -perceive- complexity but fail to realise that the underlying physicsical laws can be relatively simple.
Also, fascinating real examples of the three body problem have been discovered, with stars seen whizzing around a black hole, thanks to Hubble telescope etc, since the time that book was published, so the veracity of the computer models has become testable.
@Old_Geezer
// Maybe, at this moment, something has selected a preferred set of "memories" of the "past" for you. //
Interesting proposition. The brain certainly seems to need a 'narrative structure', putting events in sequence, in order to make sense of the world. Indeed, if it were merely an organ for filtering the multiplicity of experiences available across this simultaneously accessable timescape then things could go seriously wrong for the organism if it could no longer distinguish between 'then', 'yet to come' and 'the now' and failed to respond to a contemporary threat to its existence, for example.
The concept of a 'something' that inserts memories, selected for you which, I presume, help you to rationalise your present state of existence is, frankly, disturbing and has shades of The Matrix about it.
//I think you might be confusing causality with determinism in that post. //
Probably. I know certain words have a much tighter definition within the scientific domain than their typical, colloquial uses.
All I was trying to get across is that it is possible to look at the universe, -perceive- complexity but fail to realise that the underlying physicsical laws can be relatively simple.
Also, fascinating real examples of the three body problem have been discovered, with stars seen whizzing around a black hole, thanks to Hubble telescope etc, since the time that book was published, so the veracity of the computer models has become testable.
@Old_Geezer
// Maybe, at this moment, something has selected a preferred set of "memories" of the "past" for you. //
Interesting proposition. The brain certainly seems to need a 'narrative structure', putting events in sequence, in order to make sense of the world. Indeed, if it were merely an organ for filtering the multiplicity of experiences available across this simultaneously accessable timescape then things could go seriously wrong for the organism if it could no longer distinguish between 'then', 'yet to come' and 'the now' and failed to respond to a contemporary threat to its existence, for example.
The concept of a 'something' that inserts memories, selected for you which, I presume, help you to rationalise your present state of existence is, frankly, disturbing and has shades of The Matrix about it.
O.G.; I know it's taken a while (How time flies :-) but I read that in 1908, the Cambridge idealist J.M. McTaggart put forward the argument against the reality of time. He said that any given event must successively be future, present and past. For example, my death lies in the future, yet (sadly) it is fated to become present and in due course it will fade into the past. But future, present and past are incompatible properties so time cannot exist.
His colleague Bertrand Russell asserted that tensed properties like past present and future are not real properties of events at all, rather like north and south - where you are now is south to some and north to others, these are simply terms we use to describe our relationship to the events or places in question.
His colleague Bertrand Russell asserted that tensed properties like past present and future are not real properties of events at all, rather like north and south - where you are now is south to some and north to others, these are simply terms we use to describe our relationship to the events or places in question.
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