Morning. Yesterday you saw Dr. B. and all is
well. Since originally seeing her you have lost twenty-five pounds and she is
pleased that you are pleased. Your A1c is 6.4 and you did not go over 150 once,
plus you are feeling better internally, so to speak. Also, Joe and Jason
finished up. You are both quite pleased with the results and told them as well
as your contractor, Larry Kessler. You are going with the seamless clear glass
from Alluring and the granite seat will be fifteen inches deep. This was ordered
this morning and it will be seven to ten days before it is installed. – This
morning you have errands to run. – Amorella
The other
day I asked you to note the tube train. - Amorella
2206
hours. A tube/subway train either running into the tunnel or from it. You can
view it at:
imgur.com/gallery/TnfzrDD
Or
google: ‘you can change the direction just by thinking about it’.
This is my comment on
the ‘tube train’ from my Facebook page:
“This reminds
me of time flowing in one direction. We think of it going forward because,
well, it is. However, time flow was before us so how do we know that in the
greater range of the scheme of things that it is not going in the other
direction, which might not be in reverse -- just another direction, that
'forward' is not the 'direction' either. Besides physics moves -- time might be
inert. Time might not be the correct [perception] word for it. This might not
make sense, and maybe that is the problem in definition, we are built to make
'things' make sense and in doing so it is us that creates the 'alternate
reality'; that is 'we' are the alternate reality in our being conscious. Just a
thought.” - rho
You make a point that “time
might be inert”. Later, you thought about Einstein’s concept of time and this
article from Discover.
** **
1
From
Discover magazine
2
Newsflash:
Time May Not Exist
FROM THE JUNE 2007 ISSUE
Newsflash: Time May Not Exist
Not to mention the question of which way it goes ...
By Tim Folger|Tuesday, June
12, 2007
No
one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck
Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the
shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser
pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The
events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a
second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second
is to 300 million years.
But
even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm
called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by
like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and
intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break
down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth
of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for
now.
Efforts
to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange
juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the
most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why
is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The
meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says
Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The
situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare
oneself an agnostic.”
The
trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general
theories of relativity demolished the idea of time
as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present,
and future are not absolutes. Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics
because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the
large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum
physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the
renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt,
then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation
that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum
mechanics. But the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has always been
controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to
our understanding of time.
“One
finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo
Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille,
France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that
the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that
the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”
No
one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum
theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists,
Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great
masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in
which, ultimately, there is no time.
The
possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the “problem
of time.” It may be the biggest, but it is far from the only temporal
conundrum. Vying for second place is this strange fact: The laws of physics don’t
explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether
Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if
time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it
never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.
“It’s
quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time,” says Seth Lloyd, a
quantum mechanical engineer at MIT. (When I ask him what time it is, he
answers, “Beats me. Are we done?”) “The usual explanation of this is that in
order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the
physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition.”
The mother of all initial conditions,
Lloyd says, was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a
very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics
themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the
universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and
disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in entropy—is
driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we
think of as the ceaseless forward march of time.
Time,
in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no
clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way
Newton did: “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own
nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external.” But as Einstein
proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton
believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the
universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.
“I
recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,”
says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the
nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’
They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very
humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks
measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is
defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”
Rovelli,
the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right.
Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. “We
never really see time,” he says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object
moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your
clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only
the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a
physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really
observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but
we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.
“What
happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this
game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not
observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one
another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the
macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect.
It’s something that emerges only for big things.”
By
“big things,” Rovelli means anything that exists much above the mysterious
Planck scale. As of now there is no physical theory that completely describes
what the universe is like below the Planck scale. One possibility is that if
physicists ever manage to unify quantum theory and general relativity, space
and time will be described by some modified version of quantum mechanics. In
such a theory, space and time would no longer be smooth and continuous. Rather,
they would consist of discrete fragments—quanta, in the argot of physics—just
as light is composed of individual bundles of energy called photons. These
would be the building blocks of space and time. It’s not easy to imagine space
and time being made of something else. Where would the components of space and
time exist, if not in space and time?
As
Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy
can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite
number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day
shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a
single dimensionless point. “Space and time in some sense melt in this picture,”
says Rovelli. “There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living
on top of one another without being immersed in a space.”
Rovelli
has been working with one of the world’s leading mathematicians, Alain Connes
of the College of France in Paris, on this notion. Together they have developed
a framework to show how the thing we experience as time might emerge from a
more fundamental, timeless reality. As Rovelli describes it, “Time may be an
approximate concept that emerges at large scales—a bit like the concept of ‘surface
of the water,’ which makes sense macroscopically but which loses a precise
sense at the level of the atoms.”
Realizing
that his explanation may only be deepening the mystery of time, Rovelli says
that much of the knowledge that we now take for granted was once considered
equally perplexing. “I realize that the picture is not intuitive. But this is
what fundamental physics is about: finding new ways of thinking about the world
and proposing them and seeing if they work. I think that when Galileo said that
the Earth was spinning crazily around, it was utterly incomprehensible in the
same manner. Space for Copernicus was not the same as space for Newton, and
space for Newton was not the same as space for Einstein. We always learn a
little bit more.”
Einstein,
for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when
his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s
family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That
means nothing. People like us, who
believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future
is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Rovelli senses another temporal
breakthrough just around the corner. “Einstein’s 1905 paper came out and
suddenly changed people’s thinking about space-time. We’re again in the middle
of something like that,” he says. When the dust settles, time—whatever it may
be—could turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein
could imagine.
Selected and edited from -- http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time
I added the ‘bold’ for
emphasis. - rho
** **
You lean the very basics of what humans
consider time and reality being “stranger and more illusory than even Einstein
could imagine.” – Amorella
2225 hours. We human beings can
only deal with what we observe. However, we then make interpretations of what
we observe. These are a reality from our perspective. I imagine alien minds
would also see reality as we do, that is in terms of mathematics and physics
through reason but it could be that we are a part of and exist as less than a
shadow of the greater reality on which the shadow is but a reflection. I am
more Platonic minded than I am Aristotelian. We don’t know what ‘time’ is and
by the same token we don’t know what ‘space’ is either. We put them together
because it is reasonable to us to do so. I do not disagree. Still, I question
the very basics. Why, because we really don’t know what they are.
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