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Author Topic:   Is time merely a concept?
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5390 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 9 of 55 (432755)
11-08-2007 1:41 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Salamander
11-07-2007 4:54 PM


Hi all,
Here's my first post. I stumbled upon this forum a while ago and was impressed with a lot of the intelligent comments I’ve read on here. I doubt I’ll have time to be super active or anything, but I hope I will be able to post every now and then. I thought I might try and add something to this particular topic.
I hope my quote boxes work ...
Salamander writes:
I was thinking over Zeno's dichotomy paradox. He states that we can never fully reach any point because to get to the point, we must first go half way to it, but before that, half way to the half way point, ad infinitum. Seeing as how we do reach points all the time (ie, I never have any problem getting to work), it seems there is no real paradox here, yet the reasoning is sound.
You should be aware that this “paradox” was conclusively solved hundreds of years ago with the invention of calculus. The techniques developed for adding up an infinite number of things are known as integration. If the things you are adding up become sufficiently small (in this case, the time it takes to go each halfway distance) then the integration will result in a non-infinite result. There is no need for time intervals to have a definite smallest size for this to work.
Salamander writes:
The implications of this scenario are that an object can be in two different spots at the same time. Quantum mechanics has shown this to occur with certain particles. I can’t recall the instance though. I’ll try to find it if I can. So this seems more likely, but one would think the evidence would be more substantial.
You probably think this about quantum mechanics as the result of a sloppy science popularization. If I may be permitted my own sloppiness, what quantum mechanics says is that you can’t normally think of the particle as having a definite location. A scientist can calculate the probability that if you look in a particular location you will find the particle there, and there’s also some chance it will be somewhere else if you look there, but you won’t really know unless you perform the experiment. To say this means that the particle is in two places at once seems pretty fishy to me, and as far as I am aware this quantum strangeness in no way suggests anything about the structure of time.
Salamander writes:
I came to the conclusion that time is really just change and doesn’t exist as its own entity. Its how we measure change, certainly, but without motion, would time still pass? If all motion were to stop, it would be like putting the universe on pause. It would not seem possible for time to progress, or if it were possible, it would be indefinable.
Questions such as these are not just philosophical, they are also studied in physics departments around the world. Billions of dollars are currently being spent on experiments to probe the structure of how the universe works (look up the Tevatron or the Large Hadron Collider if you are interested), and they could conceivably shed some light on the question of whether there really is a smallest unit of time and what time really is on a deep level. Some of the theoretical physicists who seem to hang out on the cosmology forum could probably add a lot of expertise to this discussion if they notice it. There’s also a very good (but quite detailed) book that covers some current theories on the physics of time that you might be interested in called The Fabric of the Cosmos.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Salamander, posted 11-07-2007 4:54 PM Salamander has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 20 by Brad McFall, posted 11-09-2007 7:22 PM fgarb has replied

  
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5390 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 16 of 55 (432905)
11-09-2007 12:32 AM
Reply to: Message 11 by Brad McFall
11-08-2007 7:52 PM


Re: Regarding Newton's idea
I guess Salamander and I picked a bad thread for our first posts. Ironic given my comment about how intelligent everyone on this forum seemed to be. I suppose I could join in. It's easy enough to combine nouns, verbs, and adjectives at random to form sentences. Hell, there are plenty of computer programs that would do it for me. I guess I just don't see the point. I hope you're having fun.
Edited by fgarb, : vowels != verbs

This message is a reply to:
 Message 11 by Brad McFall, posted 11-08-2007 7:52 PM Brad McFall has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 17 by GDR, posted 11-09-2007 1:04 AM fgarb has not replied
 Message 18 by Hyroglyphx, posted 11-09-2007 11:16 AM fgarb has not replied
 Message 19 by Taz, posted 11-09-2007 2:14 PM fgarb has replied

  
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5390 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 21 of 55 (433109)
11-10-2007 2:22 AM
Reply to: Message 20 by Brad McFall
11-09-2007 7:22 PM


Re: physics before math
Huh, I had thought that you were just messing around, but now I am starting to understand some of what you are saying. Sorry if I caused offense, but it is quite a challenge to sift through the grammer to get to the content, at least for me.
Brad writes:
What if flame spectra (which look like infinite fundamental series somewhat) indicated some kind of motion ONLY under a class of cardinals of some such infinite ordinal. It might be that Salamander's time is not integrable physically.
Maybe time is quantized and maybe it isn't, but what do flame spectra have to do with it? The quantization of such chemical transitions is well understood and does not suggest that time is quantized. And even if time is quantized, the Zeno's "paradox" example is still quite integrable using delta functions.
Brad writes:
I am working on time following the quaternion axiom
There are many ways to write Maxwell's equations. You can use vectors or tensors ... and aparently this link shows that you can use quaternions as well. That makes sense, it's just another way of representing the cross product. So this is all interesting, but I don't see the point. The equations are the what they are regardless. Their physical meaning is unchanged, and I don't see what any of this has to do with quantization or with the fundamental nature of time.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 20 by Brad McFall, posted 11-09-2007 7:22 PM Brad McFall has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 25 by Brad McFall, posted 11-13-2007 8:48 PM fgarb has replied

  
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5390 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 22 of 55 (433110)
11-10-2007 2:31 AM
Reply to: Message 19 by Taz
11-09-2007 2:14 PM


Re: Regarding Newton's idea
I see. I've been on some forums where people come on and start writing like this just because they think it's funny to be a pain in the ass. Based on Brad's most recent post though, I guess I can believe that he is legit. It's just really hard to understand what he's saying.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 19 by Taz, posted 11-09-2007 2:14 PM Taz has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 23 by Salamander, posted 11-11-2007 3:55 PM fgarb has replied

  
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5390 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 24 of 55 (433452)
11-12-2007 2:12 AM
Reply to: Message 23 by Salamander
11-11-2007 3:55 PM


Re: Regarding Newton's idea
Hey, it's all interesting stuff, but also very tricky to understand.
Salamander writes:
Motion has to be a property of matter.
Just to be strictly correct, I think most physicists would not say a photon is matter, yet motion is a property of the photon as well.
Salamander writes:
If quantum mechanics does show that a photon or other particle can be in two places at once, is that really travel?
I still would argue that quantum mechanics does not allow that, at least based on my interpretation of your wording. But in any event, quantum mechanics does allow the small possibility for you to measure a particle to be in two wildly separated locations only separated by a very short time. It would probably be more correct to think of the particle as teleporting between the locations rather than traveling between them, because it was never at any location in between, and it never possessed the properties of velocity or energy that would be needed to send a particle across that space in a normal way.
Salamander writes:
Couldn't it all just be motion, and we're using a concept of time to measure it?
If so then space is also a property of motion, since space and time are fundamentally linked through relativity. I think that's valid under general relativity, but I really don't know enough about this subject to answer that. I'm not aware of any reason why that couldn't be true.
Salamander writes:
we always comtemplate galaxies as disks. Would they look any different if we could see the entire galaxy as it was in one moment in time?
The speed of objects within a galaxy is almost always tiny compared to the speed of light, so I don't think the galaxy would have a much different shape if you could somehow magically observe it all at the same time.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 23 by Salamander, posted 11-11-2007 3:55 PM Salamander has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 32 by Salamander, posted 11-19-2007 4:02 PM fgarb has replied

  
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5390 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 26 of 55 (434015)
11-14-2007 12:24 AM
Reply to: Message 25 by Brad McFall
11-13-2007 8:48 PM


Re: physics before math
Hi Brad. Let me see if I understand the general idea that you are getting at.
1) I still have not had time to dig through your all your link, but based on a skim, you are speculating that the electric field has a time component which arises from the real component in your quaternion formulation. You then do some work with Maxwell's Equations, etc., to determine the consequences of this assumption.
2) You think you can link this idea to the fundamental nature of time.
I think I've gotten that much out of what you are saying. But to go from step 1 to 2 you are talking about science philosophy, the electromagnetic properties of crustaceans, chemical emission lines, and Cantor Sets. I don't think you should be surprised that I can't see the connection between any of these things and your primary argument. If you want to try and explain this in baby steps, I'm willing to try reading it again.
Aside from my confusion about what you are trying to say in your post, your point 1 is profoundly suspect. Of all the fundamental forces of physics, electromagnetism is *the best* understood. It is theoretically beautiful and well motivated, with electricity and magnetism linked through special relativity in a satisfying way. Experimentally, its predictions have been tested down to parts in billions, and never found to differ from theory. How would you add a time component to the electric field without messing that up? And finally, have you thought through the implications of this for QED, or does that all go out the window? If this somehow ties into QED, then would not this change in the EM potential alter the properties of the photon in a fundamental way?
Edited by fgarb, : Correcting misunderstanding of link

This message is a reply to:
 Message 25 by Brad McFall, posted 11-13-2007 8:48 PM Brad McFall has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 27 by Brad McFall, posted 11-14-2007 5:33 PM fgarb has not replied
 Message 28 by Brad McFall, posted 11-17-2007 7:37 PM fgarb has replied

  
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5390 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 29 of 55 (435010)
11-18-2007 2:32 PM
Reply to: Message 28 by Brad McFall
11-17-2007 7:37 PM


Re: physics before math
It sounds like you are attempting a *very* ambitious research project. I don't know much about the biological subjects you are speaking about or "Gladyshev’s law", but if you want to use the formulation of Maxwell's equations you poted in that link, then you do need to take into account the E&M advancements that have been made in the last 50 years. It is not enough to show that your theory reproduces classical electrodynamics. To be taken seriously by the physics community, I think you will have to show that it is consistent with quantum electrodynamics (QED). Under QED, you can't change the EM potential without fundamentally altering the behavior of electrons and photons.
If you aren't familiar with this, then I recommend you pick up a quantum field theory book such as this one. It looks like it's now out of print, but I recommend you work through the equivalent of chapters 1-5 in this book (start with the Dirac formulation for EM interactions and go through the steps to forumulate the Feynman rules). If you can show that the Feynman rules are unchanged for your quaternion potential, then you theory has a chance of being consistent with current experimental observations from particle physics.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 28 by Brad McFall, posted 11-17-2007 7:37 PM Brad McFall has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 30 by Brad McFall, posted 11-18-2007 8:29 PM fgarb has replied

  
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5390 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 31 of 55 (435074)
11-18-2007 10:39 PM
Reply to: Message 30 by Brad McFall
11-18-2007 8:29 PM


Re: ostracod exemplar
Hi Brad,
Are you a grad student? What university? Compared to other biologists I've talked to, I'm impressed with the amount of math/physics you know. I'm a grad student in physics myself, but I know way less of your field than you seem to know of mine.
You seem to know a lot of E+M, but unless you have a solid background of Quantum Mechanics, I think it would be more trouble than it is worth to go digging into a field theory book yourself. Since you are being offered lab access, if it isn't too costly/time consuming, you might as well just do the lab work first to see if your hypothesis is even reasonable. If it is then you could probably get a physicist interested enough to check out the particle physics ramifications to see if it makes any sense at all on that level. Hell, if you saw positive results I might volunteer to do it myself, even though I'm an experimentalist and I'd be rusty getting back into the old field theory equations.
If you were correct, this would be one of the greatest revolutions in the history of physics. But it is an extreme long shot. QED has been considered a done deal for decades now (for good reason), and I think your change in the Maxwell equations would force a fundamental rethinking of it. I suspect it would change the fundamental particle interactions, and it might even demand the existence of a new particle to preserve gauge invariance - at which point one would have to figure out why it hasn't been created and seen at particle colliders. Given how rusty I am, it would probably require a couple days of work for me to carefully go through and determine the obvious consequences of this change, which I don't have time for right now, but my instinct says they would be very significant.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 30 by Brad McFall, posted 11-18-2007 8:29 PM Brad McFall has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 33 by Brad McFall, posted 11-19-2007 6:13 PM fgarb has not replied

  
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5390 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 34 of 55 (435418)
11-20-2007 7:44 PM
Reply to: Message 32 by Salamander
11-19-2007 4:02 PM


Re: Regarding Newton's idea
Heh. Quantum entanglement is some fun and wierd stuff. As I recall, Einstein first proposed it as a reason why quantum mechanics must be wrong. He thought the idea of instananeous interactions between widely separated particles was so absurd, that by showing it was a consequence of quantum mechanics, it would undermine the theory. Instead, experimentalists ran out and tested the idea, and sure enough, quantum entangelement is true and particles can interact instantaneously across immense distances. I know there are theories to explain how this can be possible, but as far as I know there is no experimental evidence for any of them.
Salamander writes:
They had an LCD display that flashed a random number fast enough that it was unreadable. Then they gave the display to a guy and hoisted him up a couple hundred feet in the air in a harness, then had him stare at the display to see if he could tell what the number was while he was in freefall. Turns out he could, and even when he was off, he chose a number very close in shape to the actual number.
Good to know our adrenaline is useful for something! But I don't understand your argument. Are you just saying that it is possible to take in more information in a given amount of time than our brains normally do? If so, then of course that's possible. Or are you saying that this has something to do with a possible "smallest unit of time"? If the latter, you should check up on how precise time measurements have gotten.
If time is quantized, it is at a level that human/animal perception cannot ever hope to detect. For example, there is a particle called the tau that is created at particle colliders. This particle is incredibly unstable and decays almost instantaneously into other, more stable particles. While the lifetime of the particle is inherently random, the average amount of time it lives before decaying has been measured to be 0.29 trillionths of a second (with an uncertainty on that number of ~0.3%). I could probably find better examples than this with some thought, but this at least shows that if time is quantized, and the unit of time is larger than maybe a thousandth of a trillionth of a second, this measurement would be impossible at such precision.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 32 by Salamander, posted 11-19-2007 4:02 PM Salamander has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 35 by Salamander, posted 11-21-2007 12:16 AM fgarb has not replied

  
fgarb
Member (Idle past 5390 days)
Posts: 98
From: Naperville, IL
Joined: 11-08-2007


Message 37 of 55 (435797)
11-23-2007 12:32 AM


An observation ...
You folks are doing a lot of speculation about the fundamental nature of time. While I am going to remain agnostic about such things, I do notice that there hasn't been much talk about the nature of space. I do want to point out something that humans have learned from the last 100 years of physics: time and space are fundamentally linked to each other. You can't really separate time from space.
At least, not in the way that the discussions on this thread seem to be proceeding. If time is quantized, then chances are that space is also quantized. If time is/is not a fundamental property of the universe, then the same is also probably true of space, and that really should be taken into account if you are trying to decide whether your ideas make sense. To have an intelligent conversation about these things, I think you at least need to have some knowledge of Einstein's theory of special relativity. There are many good books out there that delve into this theory. If people were interested, I could also try and explain some of the basics here when I have time, though a super-detailed discussion might be beyond the scope of the thread.

Replies to this message:
 Message 38 by Brad McFall, posted 11-27-2007 6:04 PM fgarb has not replied
 Message 42 by quasimotto, posted 12-13-2007 6:49 AM fgarb has not replied

  
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