The Dark Side of Time

[Parodite]

Although way above my pay grade.. I found this very interesting.

oy47OQxUBvw

See also:

CHRONOMETRY OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL TIME

D. G. Pavlov

Moscow State Technical University n. a. N. E. Bauman
hypercomplex@mail.ru

The concept of the multi-dimensional time has tried not once to take its place in nat-
ural science, but every time under the pressure of some paradox was rejected. Meanwhile a
philosophical question: why the space admits quite a number of dimensions and the time dos
not, still preserves. In this work a new attempt has been made to resolve the matter, by
switching from the traditional quadratic metrics to the Finslerian one, which may admit an
arbitrary degree of the vector component that is included into the metric function. Though the
o®ered method enables us to build continuums of time of any natural dimensionality, in order
to demonstrate the speci¯city of the raised topic this study will focus on a simple (after rather
trivial two-dimensional case) example of three temporial dimensions.

[...]

http://hypercomplex.xpsweb.com/articles ... 1-03-e.pdf

[noddy]

also above my paygrade but one thing that leaps out is this alleged philosophical paradox of space having multiple dimensions but time not having them.

ermm, why ? how ? what ? not that i think time is guaranteed to be a simple straight line as per our puny perceptions but trying to bring this kind of analogy into it is a bit of a stretch.

i personally think the distance between creative science fiction, lunatic philosophy and this type of meta physics is a very small gap indeed.

[Parodite]

also above my paygrade but one thing that leaps out is this alleged philosophical paradox of space having multiple dimensions but time not having them.

ermm, why ? how ? what ? not that i think time is guaranteed to be a simple straight line as per our puny perceptions but trying to bring this kind of analogy into it is a bit of a stretch.

i personally think the distance between creative science fiction, lunatic philosophy and this type of meta physics is a very small gap indeed.

I think the guy is "just playing" (a good thing to do!) but maybe what he does and what others do juggling around with concepts and making equations that try to remain consistent with standard physics... still produce theories that predict new observations, or with hindsight explain better the already available data as with the "dark matter and dark energy" problem.

In the mean time I found this nice video about time, that serves also as a good primer for the subject:

4BjGWLJNPcA

See if I can find some more later.

[Typhoon]

Although way above my pay grade.. I found this very interesting.

oy47OQxUBvw

Okay, I finally got around to skimming through this.

Sorry to say, but it's not even wrong.

For example, the section on the redshift of light.

This is a well understood phenomena that does not require "existics" to explain it and there is no violation of the conservation of energy in the standard description as is claimed.

Basically a lot of incorrect [and incoherent] claims are made.

See also:

CHRONOMETRY OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL TIME

D. G. Pavlov

Moscow State Technical University n. a. N. E. Bauman
hypercomplex@mail.ru

The concept of the multi-dimensional time has tried not once to take its place in nat-
ural science, but every time under the pressure of some paradox was rejected. Meanwhile a
philosophical question: why the space admits quite a number of dimensions and the time dos
not, still preserves. In this work a new attempt has been made to resolve the matter, by
switching from the traditional quadratic metrics to the Finslerian one, which may admit an
arbitrary degree of the vector component that is included into the metric function. Though the
o®ered method enables us to build continuums of time of any natural dimensionality, in order
to demonstrate the speci¯city of the raised topic this study will focus on a simple (after rather
trivial two-dimensional case) example of three temporial dimensions.

[...]

http://hypercomplex.xpsweb.com/articles ... 1-03-e.pdf

I don't know enough about Finsler manifolds to comment in detail.

However, what evidence is there that more than one time dimension is necessary or useful?

A general observation: there are lots of interesting open questions in physics and mathematics.
No need to make stuff up.

Some even offer a non-trivial monetary reward:

Millennium Prize Problems

The Yang-Mills existence and mass gap problem [particle physics] and the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem [fluid dynamics] are physics specific.

As for time, a good starting point is Boltzmann's H Theorem

[Parodite]

Thanks, Typhoon. It is impossible for me to judge, maybe you are right and he produced a lot of not even wrong stuff. But did he make basic mathematical errors, and in what way is he inconsistent?

You ask why we would need more than linear time to begin with. I don't know, but why not play with it? The "space-time continuum" is after all also but kind of an arbitrary concept that works fine only to a degree. It creates conundrums as with the Big Bang: "Once upon a mysterious time in a mysterious location, space and time as we know it started". Just saying: it just all begs for more questions. Cool

Just some thoughts FWIW.

Historically, both space and time as supposedly sturdy rest frames have undergone some serious needed reviews. And there is no end in sight yet. The way we perceive of space and time is a result primarily of sensory perception that emerges in our brains and they have already be proven to be incomplete and "not even wrong" when Einstein introduced relativity, that is proven to be real. Not only relative motion / acceleration, but even merely being at different altitudes from a shared gravitational source is enough for cesium atomic clocks to tick at different relative speeds. Gravitational time dilation:

Gravitational time dilation is an actual difference of elapsed time between two events as measured by observers differently situated from gravitational masses, in regions of different gravitational potential. The lower the gravitational potential (the closer the clock is to the source of gravitation), the more slowly time passes. Albert Einstein originally predicted this effect in his theory of relativity[1] and it has since been confirmed by tests of general relativity.

This has been demonstrated by noting that atomic clocks at differing altitudes (and thus different gravitational potential) will eventually show different times. The effects detected in such experiments are extremely small, with differences being measured in nanoseconds.

Gravitational time dilation was first described by Albert Einstein in 1907[2] as a consequence of special relativity in accelerated frames of reference. In general relativity, it is considered to be a difference in the passage of proper time at different positions as described by a metric tensor of spacetime. The existence of gravitational time dilation was first confirmed directly by the Pound–Rebka experiment.

Space, time and gravitation therefor are not only conceptually interlinked for all practical purposes, but require and underlying unifying model to account for all three.

I also noted what seems to me a misconception about a difference between space and time: time is linear because we cannot go back in time (as also per the laws of thermodynamics), whereas in space "we can move back and forth". Fly from Amsterdam to New York, but also back again. This is obviously false: the Amsterdam you depart from, is in actuality not the Amsterdam anymore you return to. Me thinks both "space"and "time" are equally linear in that sense. Time travel "to the future or the past" are for that reason nonsensical, as is "space travel" as a concept misleading for the same reason.

[Parodite]

Gravity’s effect on time confirmed

Physicists in the US and Germany have used two fundamental tenets of quantum mechanics to perform a high-precision test of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The researchers exploited wave-particle duality and superposition within an atom interferometer to prove that an effect known as gravitational redshift – the slowing down of time near a massive body – holds true to a precision of seven parts in a billion. The result is important in the search for a theory of quantum gravity and could have significant practical implications, such as improving the accuracy of global positioning systems.


Gravitational redshift follows on from the equivalence principle that underlies general relativity. The equivalence principle states that the local effects of gravity are the same as those of being in an accelerated frame of reference. So the downward force felt by someone in a lift could be equally due to an upward acceleration of the lift or to gravity. Pulses of light sent upwards from a clock on the lift floor will be Doppler shifted, or redshifted, when the lift is accelerating upwards, meaning that this clock will appear to tick more slowly when its flashes are compared at the ceiling of the lift to another clock. Because there is no way to tell gravity and acceleration apart, the same will hold true in a gravitational field; in other words the greater the gravitational pull experienced by a clock, or the closer it is to a massive body, the more slowly it will tick.

Confirmation of this effect supports the idea that gravity is a manifestation of space–time curvature because the flow of time is no longer constant throughout the universe but varies according to the distribution of massive bodies. Reinforcing the idea of space–time curvature is important when distinguishing between different theories of quantum gravity because there are some versions of string theory in which matter can respond to something other than the geometry of space–time.

Universality of freefall

Gravitational redshift, however, as a manifestation of local position invariance (the idea that the outcome of any non-gravitational experiment is independent of where and when in the universe it is carried out) is the least well confirmed of the three types of experiment that support the equivalence principle. The other two, the universality of freefall and local Lorentz invariance, have been verified with precisions of 10–13 or better, whereas gravitational redshift had previously been confirmed only to a precision of 7 × 10–5. This was achieved in 1976 by recording the difference in elapsed time as measured by two atomic clocks – one on the surface of the Earth and the other sent up to an altitude of 10,000 km in a rocket.

This kind of redshift measurement is limited by the degree of gravitational pull provided by the Earth's mass. The new research, carried out by Holger Müller of the University of California Berkeley, Achim Peters of Humboldt University in Berlin and Steven Chu, previously at Berkeley but now US secretary of energy, is limited in the same way but manages to dramatically increase precision thanks to an ultrafine clock provided by quantum mechanics.

In 1997 Peters used laser trapping techniques developed by Chu to capture caesium atoms and cool them to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero (in order to reduce their velocity as much as possible), and then used a vertical laser beam to impart an upward kick to the atoms in order to measure gravitational freefall.

Now, Chu and Müller have re-interpreted the results of that experiment to give a measurement of the gravitational redshift.

In the experiment each of the atoms was exposed to three laser pulses. The first pulse placed the atom into a superposition of two equally probable states – either leaving it alone to decelerate and then fall back down to Earth under gravity's pull or giving it an extra kick so that it reached a greater height before descending. A second pulse was then applied at just the right moment so as to push the atom in the second state back faster toward Earth, causing the two superposition states to meet on the way down. At this point the third pulse measured the interference between these two states brought about by the atom's existence as a wave, the idea being that any difference in gravitational redshift as experienced by the two states existing at difference heights above the Earth's surface would be manifest as a change in the relative phase of the two states.

Enormous frequency

The virtue of this approach is the extremely high frequency of a caesium atom's de Broglie wave – some 3 × 1025 Hz. Although during the 0.3 s of freefall the matter waves on the higher trajectory experienced an elapsed time of just 2 × 10–20 s more than the waves on the lower trajectory did, the enormous frequency of their oscillation, combined with the ability to measure amplitude differences of just one part in 1000, meant that the researchers were able to confirm gravitational redshift to a precision of 7 × 10–9.

As Müller puts it, "If the time of freefall was extended to the age of the universe – 14 billion years – the time difference between the upper and lower routes would be a mere one thousandth of a second, and the accuracy of the measurement would be 60 ps, the time it takes for light to travel about a centimetre."

This extreme precision could become useful as global positioning systems become ever more accurate. As Müller points out, to determine the position of an object on the ground to millimetre accuracy the atomic clocks on GPS satellites would need to operate with a precision of 10–17, a figure in fact achieved recently by a clock developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US (see "New optical clock breaks accuracy record"). But at the satellites' altitude of 20,000 km, such clocks will experience a speeding up of time of about one part in 1010 thanks to gravitational redshift. Recovering the precision of 10–17 would therefore require knowing the redshift effect to a precision of 10–7.

Müller hopes to further improve the precision of the redshift measurements by increasing the distance between the two superposition states of the caesium atoms. The distance achieved in the current research was a mere 0.1 mm, but, he says, by increasing this to 1 m it should be possible to detect gravitational waves, miniscule ripples in the fabric of space–time predicted by general relativity but never before observed.

The work is described in Nature 463 926.


About the author

Edwin Cartlidge is a science writer based in Rome

[Parodite]

4a-o5-EYzTY

fv2gBjQ8xIo

http://www.hef.ru.nl/~rloll/Web/title/title.html

Renate Loll is Professor in Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics and Particle Physics of the Radboud University, Nijmegen. She also holds a Distinguished Research Chair at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. - Loll received her Ph.D. from Imperial College, London. She has previously worked as a Heisenberg Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm, Germany, and held a professorship at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.


Loll works on developing a theory of quantum gravity, reconciling the beautiful geometric description of space and time laid out in Einstein's theory of General Relativity with the insight that all of physics at its most fundamental level must be described by quantum laws of motion. She is one of the pioneers of a new approach to the nonperturbative quantization of gravity, that of Causal Dynamical Triangulations which in recent times has produced a number of remarkable results. These include a dynamical derivation of the fact that space-time is four-dimensional (something that can be taken for granted only in classical gravity) and that it has the shape of a de Sitter Universe (like our own universe in the absence of matter), and of the so-called wave function of the universe which plays an important role in understanding the quantum behaviour of the very early universe. Remarkably, one also finds that the dimensionality of spacetime reduces smoothly to two at short distances, indicative of a highly nonclassical behaviour of spacetime geometry near the Planck scale. These results are obtained by superposing elementary quantum excitations of geometry which have a causal structure (allowing us to distinguish between cause and effect) built into them at the very smallest scale.
Loll is recipient of a prestigious VICI award (2005-2012) by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). She is Editorial Board member and Subject Editor of the international journal Living Reviews in Relativity and Associate Editor of the international journal General Relativity and Gravitation. Loll is a member of the Governing Board of FOM, the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter and chairs the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

[Typhoon]

Gravity’s effect on time confirmed

Physicists in the US and Germany have used two fundamental tenets of quantum mechanics to perform a high-precision test of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The researchers exploited wave-particle duality and superposition within an atom interferometer to prove that an effect known as gravitational redshift – the slowing down of time near a massive body – holds true to a precision of seven parts in a billion. The result is important in the search for a theory of quantum gravity and could have significant practical implications, such as improving the accuracy of global positioning systems.


Gravitational redshift follows on from the equivalence principle that underlies general relativity. The equivalence principle states that the local effects of gravity are the same as those of being in an accelerated frame of reference. So the downward force felt by someone in a lift could be equally due to an upward acceleration of the lift or to gravity. Pulses of light sent upwards from a clock on the lift floor will be Doppler shifted, or redshifted, when the lift is accelerating upwards, meaning that this clock will appear to tick more slowly when its flashes are compared at the ceiling of the lift to another clock. Because there is no way to tell gravity and acceleration apart, the same will hold true in a gravitational field; in other words the greater the gravitational pull experienced by a clock, or the closer it is to a massive body, the more slowly it will tick.

Confirmation of this effect supports the idea that gravity is a manifestation of space–time curvature because the flow of time is no longer constant throughout the universe but varies according to the distribution of massive bodies. Reinforcing the idea of space–time curvature is important when distinguishing between different theories of quantum gravity because there are some versions of string theory in which matter can respond to something other than the geometry of space–time.

Universality of freefall

Gravitational redshift, however, as a manifestation of local position invariance (the idea that the outcome of any non-gravitational experiment is independent of where and when in the universe it is carried out) is the least well confirmed of the three types of experiment that support the equivalence principle. The other two, the universality of freefall and local Lorentz invariance, have been verified with precisions of 10–13 or better, whereas gravitational redshift had previously been confirmed only to a precision of 7 × 10–5. This was achieved in 1976 by recording the difference in elapsed time as measured by two atomic clocks – one on the surface of the Earth and the other sent up to an altitude of 10,000 km in a rocket.

This kind of redshift measurement is limited by the degree of gravitational pull provided by the Earth's mass. The new research, carried out by Holger Müller of the University of California Berkeley, Achim Peters of Humboldt University in Berlin and Steven Chu, previously at Berkeley but now US secretary of energy, is limited in the same way but manages to dramatically increase precision thanks to an ultrafine clock provided by quantum mechanics.

In 1997 Peters used laser trapping techniques developed by Chu to capture caesium atoms and cool them to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero (in order to reduce their velocity as much as possible), and then used a vertical laser beam to impart an upward kick to the atoms in order to measure gravitational freefall.

Now, Chu and Müller have re-interpreted the results of that experiment to give a measurement of the gravitational redshift.

In the experiment each of the atoms was exposed to three laser pulses. The first pulse placed the atom into a superposition of two equally probable states – either leaving it alone to decelerate and then fall back down to Earth under gravity's pull or giving it an extra kick so that it reached a greater height before descending. A second pulse was then applied at just the right moment so as to push the atom in the second state back faster toward Earth, causing the two superposition states to meet on the way down. At this point the third pulse measured the interference between these two states brought about by the atom's existence as a wave, the idea being that any difference in gravitational redshift as experienced by the two states existing at difference heights above the Earth's surface would be manifest as a change in the relative phase of the two states.

Enormous frequency

The virtue of this approach is the extremely high frequency of a caesium atom's de Broglie wave – some 3 × 1025 Hz. Although during the 0.3 s of freefall the matter waves on the higher trajectory experienced an elapsed time of just 2 × 10–20 s more than the waves on the lower trajectory did, the enormous frequency of their oscillation, combined with the ability to measure amplitude differences of just one part in 1000, meant that the researchers were able to confirm gravitational redshift to a precision of 7 × 10–9.

As Müller puts it, "If the time of freefall was extended to the age of the universe – 14 billion years – the time difference between the upper and lower routes would be a mere one thousandth of a second, and the accuracy of the measurement would be 60 ps, the time it takes for light to travel about a centimetre."

This extreme precision could become useful as global positioning systems become ever more accurate. As Müller points out, to determine the position of an object on the ground to millimetre accuracy the atomic clocks on GPS satellites would need to operate with a precision of 10–17, a figure in fact achieved recently by a clock developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US (see "New optical clock breaks accuracy record"). But at the satellites' altitude of 20,000 km, such clocks will experience a speeding up of time of about one part in 1010 thanks to gravitational redshift. Recovering the precision of 10–17 would therefore require knowing the redshift effect to a precision of 10–7.

Müller hopes to further improve the precision of the redshift measurements by increasing the distance between the two superposition states of the caesium atoms. The distance achieved in the current research was a mere 0.1 mm, but, he says, by increasing this to 1 m it should be possible to detect gravitational waves, miniscule ripples in the fabric of space–time predicted by general relativity but never before observed.

The work is described in Nature 463 926.

About the author

Edwin Cartlidge is a science writer based in Rome

This is an many order of magnitude improvement in the measurement of the gravitational redshift predicted by GR.
The first such experiment was the famous Pound - Rebka experiment.

What is interesting is that, to date, GR has passed every experiment that it has been subject to.

[Typhoon]

4a-o5-EYzTY

fv2gBjQ8xIo

http://www.hef.ru.nl/~rloll/Web/title/title.html

Renate Loll is Professor in Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics and Particle Physics of the Radboud University, Nijmegen. She also holds a Distinguished Research Chair at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. - Loll received her Ph.D. from Imperial College, London. She has previously worked as a Heisenberg Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm, Germany, and held a professorship at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.


Loll works on developing a theory of quantum gravity, reconciling the beautiful geometric description of space and time laid out in Einstein's theory of General Relativity with the insight that all of physics at its most fundamental level must be described by quantum laws of motion. She is one of the pioneers of a new approach to the nonperturbative quantization of gravity, that of Causal Dynamical Triangulations which in recent times has produced a number of remarkable results. These include a dynamical derivation of the fact that space-time is four-dimensional (something that can be taken for granted only in classical gravity) and that it has the shape of a de Sitter Universe (like our own universe in the absence of matter), and of the so-called wave function of the universe which plays an important role in understanding the quantum behaviour of the very early universe. Remarkably, one also finds that the dimensionality of spacetime reduces smoothly to two at short distances, indicative of a highly nonclassical behaviour of spacetime geometry near the Planck scale. These results are obtained by superposing elementary quantum excitations of geometry which have a causal structure (allowing us to distinguish between cause and effect) built into them at the very smallest scale.
Loll is recipient of a prestigious VICI award (2005-2012) by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). She is Editorial Board member and Subject Editor of the international journal Living Reviews in Relativity and Associate Editor of the international journal General Relativity and Gravitation. Loll is a member of the Governing Board of FOM, the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter and chairs the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

There are lots of very bright people trying to unify [or should I say reconcile] general relativity with quantum field theory since the 1930's.

Part of this involves trying to guess what might be the structure of space-time at the Planck scale.

The big problem is that we have no technology to access the Planck scale directly and physics is, after all, an experimental science.

Despite lots of approaches that appeared promising at first, this goal of a quantum gravity theory has remained both frustrating and elusive.

Perhaps CDT is on the right path or perhaps not.

[Endovelico]

Nothing gives me a sense of impotence and inadequacy even remotely close to what I feel in the presence of quantum physics. Not even those times when I couldn't achieve an erection while in bed with a beautiful female... If there is a measure of absolute ignorance, my understanding of quantum is it.

[Typhoon]

Nothing gives me a sense of impotence and inadequacy even remotely close to what I feel in the presence of quantum physics. Not even those times when I couldn't achieve an erection while in bed with a beautiful female... If there is a measure of absolute ignorance, my understanding of quantum is it.

A clear and concise statement of the key experimental observation of quantum physics:

Feyman | Quantum behaviour

The rest is details. However, there are a lot of details . . .

[Parodite]

Nothing gives me a sense of impotence and inadequacy even remotely close to what I feel in the presence of quantum physics. Not even those times when I couldn't achieve an erection while in bed with a beautiful female... If there is a measure of absolute ignorance, my understanding of quantum is it.

A lot of the mind boggling stuff re quantum mechanics seems to be caused by some very misleading jargon used that started with the Kopenhagen [not Heisenberg ) interpretation, in line with how Richard Feynman summarized the situation as referenced by Typhoon:

One might still like to ask: “How does it work? What is the machinery behind the law?” No one has found any machinery behind the law. No one can “explain” any more than we have just “explained.” No one will give you any deeper representation of the situation. We have no ideas about a more basic mechanism from which these results can be deduced.


We would like to emphasize a very important difference between classical and quantum mechanics. We have been talking about the probability that an electron will arrive in a given circumstance. We have implied that in our experimental arrangement (or even in the best possible one) it would be impossible to predict exactly what would happen. We can only predict the odds! This would mean, if it were true, that physics has given up on the problem of trying to predict exactly what will happen in a definite circumstance. Yes! physics has given up. We do not know how to predict what would happen in a given circumstance, and we believe now that it is impossible—that the only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events. It must be recognized that this is a retrenchment in our earlier ideal of understanding nature. It may be a backward step, but no one has seen a way to avoid it.


We make now a few remarks on a suggestion that has sometimes been made to try to avoid the description we have given: “Perhaps the electron has some kind of internal works—some inner variables—that we do not yet know about. Perhaps that is why we cannot predict what will happen. If we could look more closely at the electron, we could be able to tell where it would end up.” So far as we know, that is impossible. We would still be in difficulty. Suppose we were to assume that inside the electron there is some kind of machinery that determines where it is going to end up. That machine must also determine which hole it is going to go through on its way. But we must not forget that what is inside the electron should not be dependent on what we do, and in particular upon whether we open or close one of the holes. So if an electron, before it starts, has already made up its mind (a) which hole it is going to use, and (b) where it is going to land, we should find P1 for those electrons that have chosen hole 1, P2 for those that have chosen hole 2, and necessarily the sum P1+P2 for those that arrive through the two holes. There seems to be no way around this. But we have verified experimentally that that is not the case. And no one has figured a way out of this puzzle. So at the present time we must limit ourselves to computing probabilities. We say “at the present time,” but we suspect very strongly that it is something that will be with us forever—that it is impossible to beat that puzzle—that this is the way nature really is.

He basically is saying that computing probability is all we have and that it is the end of the road. And we have no idea he says, what type of mechanics can produce such results.

Statements like "The ultimate nature of reality is probabilistic" you will encounter a lot, however. From there it is only a small step to people going on a imaginary bull ride introducing "information" to the nature of reality and getting totally wild from there even saying things like "consciousness drives reality". Or that with every collapse of a wave function somewhere on the quantum scale.. a whole new Universe is created.. so that in the end zilquadrodonian many worlds are branching out into infinity.

To what physical reality can something like "the probability distribution" refer to? Is there some "probability distribution" existing in reality when there are no people around tossing with those concepts and doing QM measurements? Feynman actually admits that he has no idea what physical reality or mechanism is able to produce the (extremely accurate) results of QM.

"The collapse of the wave function" is one of those cliffhangers. The wave function is a mathematical description so when it "collapses" I suspect something weird to happen to the paper it is written on?! Or do they mean the wave pattern as observed in for instance the double slit experiment that "collapses" into a particle type of behavior when it is measured passing through the slit creating a dot instead of an interference pattern? But given that Feynman has no idea what type of mechanism can produce QM measurements as predicted by the QM formalisms.. it would be cheating to suggest that what actually happens in the experiment is equally "probabilistic" in nature as the formalisms that describe it.

Einstein is well known to have had serious problems with those assumptions. "God doesn't play dice" etc. (Added the funny rhetoric response of Nils Bohr: "Don't tell God what to do" )

I tend to think that the weirdness of QM and the suggestiveness of a probabilistic nature of reality (for which there really is zil proof - read Feynman carefully) is a similar case as the struggle with consciousness: how to squeeze/explain conscious experience from "observed physical behavior". Both are "dead ends": in the case of consciousness the phenomena is explained backwards (try to explain fire forwards in time when you start with smoke...ain't gonna work), and in the case of QM the fact there seems to be no mechanism thinkable able to produce the results... could also mean that "probability" is more like a byproduct of animating a number of assumptions of poor quality.

The math and predictions can be perfect and it is quite possible to not know why it all works. That is reasonable humility. To claim however that the nature of reality is probabilistic too just as the QM formalisms are... is of course doing the opposite of what Feynman suggests. He just says that QM does not tell you much about the nature of reality, but since QM computes damn well.. lets just compute and not philosophize too much about what it means.

[Typhoon]

Thanks, Typhoon. It is impossible for me to judge, maybe you are right and he produced a lot of not even wrong stuff. But did he make basic mathematical errors, and in what way is he inconsistent?

I didn't pay too much attention to the details of the math as he has too many basic physics concepts wrong:

The equivalence principle, the relativistic redshift, etc.

[Parodite]

Thanks, Typhoon. It is impossible for me to judge, maybe you are right and he produced a lot of not even wrong stuff. But did he make basic mathematical errors, and in what way is he inconsistent?

I didn't pay too much attention to the details of the math as he has too many basic physics concepts wrong:

The equivalence principle, the relativistic redshift, etc.

Have to get back to those then.. What he tries in any case is to explain these things in the context of his own 3d-time theory. He only has a degree in philosophy.. so it would not be totally surprising if he already goes wrong with the standard interpretation and application of those concepts.

[Typhoon]

Thanks, Typhoon. It is impossible for me to judge, maybe you are right and he produced a lot of not even wrong stuff. But did he make basic mathematical errors, and in what way is he inconsistent?

I didn't pay too much attention to the details of the math as he has too many basic physics concepts wrong:

The equivalence principle, the relativistic redshift, etc.

Have to get back to those then.. What he tries in any case is to explain these things in the context of his own 3d-time theory. He only has a degree in philosophy.. so it would not be totally surprising if he already goes wrong with the standard interpretation and application of those concepts.

My opinion, but I don't think your further time will be well spent on this crackpot.

If you want to learn some more physics, a great place to start is The Feynman Lectures on Physics

[Parodite]

My opinion, but I don't think your further time will be well spent on this crackpot.

good.

If you want to learn some more physics, a great place to start is The Feynman Lectures on Physics

Spent some time there and always good to return. Also the Susskind lectures on youtube are worthy. Watched some of them.. more spacetime is needed.

[Parodite]

A thanks to Typhoon for the new Feynman Lectures link in the Online Education section. For people like me with only a high school level of mathematics and physics it is really great, and fun if you start from the very beginning working through them. Enough to keep me busy the coming year of spacetime.

Side note re. this thread. I hope to get a better understanding and feel of spacetime and relativity. Susskind somewhere mentions that space and time are strongly interlinked, or even interchangeable. You can't think of time without space, and vice versa. That gives food for thought.

[Miss_Faucie_Fishtits]

"......However, what evidence is there that more than one time dimension is necessary or useful?......."

wut??2?..... ..... Are you the most evul man of the universe?11!.......

Multiple dimensions at whim is a vital necessity of nutter physics. You can't have enough dimensions, like you can't have enough cowbell. Or biggest guns...... or boobs. The other thing is mental telepathy, and what is the deal between nutter science and telepathy?....... and telekinesis, and multiple universes? THESE PEOPLE WANT MAGIC BACK and magic in this context seems easy to define. It's the desire to impress your imminent will on existence and reality, with a minimum of personal effort or involvement. Now, some of this phenomena can be demonstrated to have effect - but the deal breaker (to me....) seems to the minimum of personal effort times the maximum of personal gain........

Why do I get into these discussions?.....XDDDDD.......

[Parodite]

Multiple dimensions at whim is a vital necessity of nutter physics. You can't have enough dimensions, like you can't have enough cowbell. Or biggest guns...... or boobs.

Yo arth right! In string theory they toy around with eleven dimensions or more. Who needs them. (Do strings snap sometimes?) Then there are more and more non-crackpodian theoretical phycisists who claim that at the basic level there are only 2 dimensions! Only a matter of spacetime that it turns out there is only 1 dimension? Or even less, zero. No.... then they will probably invent "negative dimensions" or some such.

It might also be that our brains are engaged in a 4-D grammar of sorts. All humans seem to read and perceive the Universe in terms of space and time. How many dimensions are needed for the embedded brain to do this 4-D trick? More or less? To know best.. we need probability because it is all we have. Or change the probability wave by simply believing something... it is highly effective.

[Simple Minded]

"......However, what evidence is there that more than one time dimension is necessary or useful?......."

wut??2?..... ..... Are you the most evul man of the universe?11!.......

Multiple dimensions at whim is a vital necessity of nutter physics. You can't have enough dimensions, like you can't have enough cowbell. Or biggest guns...... or boobs. The other thing is mental telepathy, and what is the deal between nutter science and telepathy?....... and telekinesis, and multiple universes? THESE PEOPLE WANT MAGIC BACK and magic in this context seems easy to define. It's the desire to impress your imminent will on existence and reality, with a minimum of personal effort or involvement. Now, some of this phenomena can be demonstrated to have effect - but the deal breaker (to me....) seems to the minimum of personal effort times the maximum of personal gain........

Why do I get into these discussions?.....XDDDDD.......

telekinesis, will, multiple dimensions, physics, math, guns, boobs, telepathy, personal interpretations of reality (whatever the hell that is?).....boobs, this thread has it all!

It appears to me, that we are all living in our personal elysias, or hells, or heavens..... evidenced by the fact that we can't reach agreement on such basic concepts as right, left, justice, fair, capitalism, socialism, labor, co-operation, what is the correct temperature of the Earth, who has the best boobs, etc...... is that not proof of the existence of multiple dimensions?

rock on righteous dudes & dudettes!! or waltz on depending upon your temporal existence in space-time.....

joke: what is the difference between dimensions and dementia?

serious thought inspired by above joke: As one who has had multiple psychic experiences in their life ( and is sometimes demented, or so I am told ), perhaps dementia is the merely inability to stay anchored in the same universe as ones observers?

[Parodite]

joke: what is the difference between dimensions and dementia?

serious thought inspired by above joke: As one who has had multiple psychic experiences in their life ( and is sometimes demented, or so I am told ), perhaps dementia is the merely inability to stay anchored in the same universe as ones observers?

Oh this perhaps is easy SM! The disintegration of neural structure and process in the brain that we refer to as dementia means that fewer probability waves collapse into particles. The more demented you are, the higher the entropy between your ears. More entropy means less order and less available energy transfer. Less can be done. You become more and more disabled. It will be harder and harder to extract and capture energy to maintain the order-level in your head. You go from low entropy to higher entropy just like the Universe. The Universe it is dementing faster and faster.

What interests me is how the probability waves of the early universe evolved over time once they started collapsing into particles during the cooling down process that continues till today. What was the probability distribution associated with the Universe before the big bang when it was like one particle ("a singularity") and an entropy of near zero? I would think it was not very probable that many different things could happen yet. More like only one option was available: to explode or not to explode. This reminds of human behaviors where a mental state becomes like a singularity too: at one point you just have to blow yourself up. Zero entropy is very explosive. A bit like Hell.

Heaven on the other hand is very far away into the future, beyond the edges of spacetime. Supposedly with a maximum of entropy. The global probability wave has evolved from a one trick pony suicide bomber that just had to blow up... to a divine landscape of endless opportunity but where nothing really happens anymore, not even when you wait long enough. Or perhaps if you do... forever.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had ceased to exist, and the sea existed no more.
Revelations 21-1

But in a totally flat died out Universe that is stretched out at near infinity with maximum entropy... all you need is the smallest disturbance to break the symmetry... and the probability wave wakes up from its "eternal" dream state and the waves start to collapse again. God needed that little devil.

[Parodite]

9xddBeLk41o

Its nice to bet. My derivative theory is that it is not an exotic dark particle or dark energy at all. It is just curved spacetime.

Usually curved spacetime (gravity) is potrayed as some kind of result of the presence of matter/energy but that is arbitrary. One might as well say that it is the other way round, that matter is the result of a curvatures of spacetime (=gravity). This opens the possibility that the actual curvatures of spacetime are not all "occupied" by matter and energy the way we are used to.

[Typhoon]

9xddBeLk41o

Its nice to bet. My derivative theory is that it is not an exotic dark particle or dark energy at all. It is just curved spacetime.

Usually curved spacetime (gravity) is potrayed as some kind of result of the presence of matter/energy but that is arbitrary. One might as well say that it is the other way round, that matter is the result of a curvatures of spacetime (=gravity). This opens the possibility that the actual curvatures of spacetime are not all "occupied" by matter and energy the way we are used to.

Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.

~ John A. Wheeler

[Parodite]

Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.

~ John A. Wheeler

Heh, just read the same quote as I thought lets google the idea. But I find it a bit a wheelerish; half word play and half pointing to a new possibility worth to consider. As with him explaining why all electrons are "exactly identical", the only one electron in the universe idea:

Feynman's thesis advisor, John Wheeler, proposed the hypothesis in a telephone call to Feynman in the spring of 1940. He excitedly claimed to have developed a neat explanation of the quantum mechanical indistinguishability of electrons:


As a by-product of this same view, I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!" And, then he explained on the telephone, "suppose that the world lines which we were ordinarily considering before in time and space—instead of only going up in time were a tremendous knot, and then, when we cut through the knot, by the plane corresponding to a fixed time, we would see many, many world lines and that would represent many electrons, except for one thing. If in one section this is an ordinary electron world line, in the section in which it reversed itself and is coming back from the future we have the wrong sign to the proper time—to the proper four velocities—and that's equivalent to changing the sign of the charge, and, therefore, that part of a path would act like a positron." "But, Professor", I said, "there aren't as many positrons as electrons." "Well, maybe they are hidden in the protons or something", he said.

—Feynman, Richard, Nobel Lecture December 11, 1965

When observed matter and the curvature of spacetime (gravity) occur simultaneously, cannot be viewed in separation (which as far as I know is the case) one could of course say what Wheeler says but then the semantics suggest something that is incomplete if not even wrong. Chicken or egg material.

If no particles are detected to account for dark matter/dark energy and indeed something more exotic is needed to explain it... then maybe there is an egg as well as a chicken after all, maybe spin foam is the chicken here? Something that might explain curvature of ordinary 4D spacetime in the classical chicken-egg sense of Wheeler's "Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve" but also "the curvature caused by dark-matter"... Which for now just means: spacetime curves there definately but we have no idea yet why.

When more than 90% of the Universe's curved spacetime cannot be accounted for by particles with mass or energy... it just begs the question.

[Parodite]

More fascinating stuff, gravity wave astronomy:

FoN50DkFD_E