Drum said:
If we accept General relativity
…
Now we are told that the 'distortion' of Spacetime is only apparent at speeds approaching light speed or alternatively, at vast distances.
This list is significantly incomplete and inaccurate.
Relativity also predicts that such “distortion” is apparent near very massive objects, such as planets, stars, and in the extreme,
black holes. Although many theories of cosmology predict similar effects due to great distance, Relativity itself does not.
Drum said:
But surely we can measure it at any speed or distance ? In other words, any and all movement, must distort Spacetime, however small that movement is ?
Correct, and predicted precisely by Relativity, as summarized by Snoopy in
post #5.
Drum said:
All thats moving in relation to us, cars on the street, trees in the wind, the hair on our head blowing in the wind, the wind itself, our arm as we strike a home run .... must, in some sense be moving slightly into the future, or alternatively, the past.
In
formalisms with timelike dimensions, such as 3 spacelike +1 timelike dimensional
Minkowski space in which Relativity is often described, the concept of motion is effectively replaced by that of extent (“length”) in a timelike dimension. In such formalisms, objects don’t “move” along a timelike dimension like a point-body moves through a spacelike dimension in a formalism such as
classical mechanics. Rather, they extend along it, like a body with volume has a measurable length, width, and depth extends along the usual three spacelike dimensions.
Drum said:
Our body and all around us must only be synchronised when we are 'still' in relation to our selves and our surroundings. ? In other words if we could freeze frame our surroundings so that only the present were visible, then the only parts visible would be the parts that were in the same still state as the observer ? Would our arm swinging the baseball bat be visible, or only return to our view once the home run had been hit, would roads be empty of all traffic ?.
No to all three, as best I understand the questions, and physics.
It’s fairly easy, in either formal classical mechanical terms, or in practical ones, to “freeze” our surroundings for an arbitrary “present instant”. In classical mechanics, we simply discard (or ignore) all motion information about the system, rendering it motionless. In practical terms, a device such as a camera, provided its shutter speed is sufficiently high and its resolution sufficiently low, can perform the same operation, not only “freezing time”, but removing certain knowledge of motion. For example, a high-speed photo of an airborne baseball doesn’t reveal its speed or direction – we could only guess at it from, say, additional parts of the image, such as the position of the body of a person who has just thrown the ball.
In neither the classical mechanical nor the practical terms above, are objects with non-zero in any way prohibited from interacting with one another – though our formal or photographic manipulations may have destroyed the subjective knowledge necessary for us to calculate how they will or have interacted.
With Relativity added to the formalism of classical mechanics, concepts such as “present instant” become less easy to define and intuitively understand, but continue to be meaningful. Also, in a peculiar way, makes discarding velocity information more difficult, in a way analogous to how we were able to guess the direction of a thrown baseball in a high-speed photo by the position of its pitcher. With assumptions such as the known rest mass or (spatial) dimensions of a body, relativistic dilation can tell us the velocity of a body from a “frozen snapshot” of data describing it relative to the inertial frame required to define such data. For example, if our baseball was very, very precisely spherical, and of known radius (say, .115 m), nearly absolutely rigid, and we minutely measured it’s frozen image to discover exactly 2 points on its surface are precisely .1149999999999989778… m from its geometric center, we could conclude that it was moving at a relative speed of 40 m/s (an excellent fastball) in the direction defined by a line drawn through the 2 points.!
Drum said:
Is it possible that our 'esse' is in some sense not just in the present but in a wider band, bounded by our motion.
In the formalism of physics, or of any objective scientific scheme with which I’m familiar, no, or more precisely, the question is not meaningful.
In these formalism, there simply isn’t an objectively real entity corresponding to the term “esse”, “soul”, “awareness”, “consciousness”, “identity”, etc. This attribute must be defined as a “higher order” characteristic of more fundamental physically measurable bodies, which are in principle defined just like the much simpler baseball, pitcher, etc. in our previous examples. For example, if we could measure all of the physical data of a human body, or arguably just a major part of the brain, we in principle would know their complete “esse”.
Drum said:
Are we spread or smeared or 'Bell-curved' across a small amount (or even all) of the past-future with the immediate present being the mythical mid position…
I fear in this question an unhealthy combination of (relativistic or non-relativistic) classical physical formalism with the formalism of
quantum mechanics. While the interpretation of quantum mechanics as providing a “smeared” probability distribution of a particle being within a given volume of space during a given interval of time is accurate and conventional, it’s not, I think, the same as the “wider band of our esse” Drum describes in post #1. Although some correlation of the two is possible – and has been done in several complicated and highly speculative works of which I’m aware – such efforts are deep and perilous: In short, many of the people who have made them are famously smart and well-trained, yet their efforts still vague, informal, and unconvincing to their peers, little more than hopeful guesses of what future, smarter, clearer, more formal, and more convincing theorists may someday achieve.
Drum said:
Or are there simply billions of Drums, perish the thought, all acting in near-unison in parrallel universes and our 'esse' is just a condensed persona of them all ... LOL
This appears to be a reference to the or some variation of the
Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics. As above, the theoretical formalism appears to me to answer “no – the question’s not meaningful”.
In this case, the possibility of relating “esse” to the many parallel worldlines of these interpretations is even more problematical, as such interpretations usually
require complete lack of interaction between parallel worldlines. Again, some intriguing speculations of correspondence between the two concepts has been proposed, but appears far too underdeveloped to be considered science.
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