Time Is Not A Physical Entity

[Moronium]

You are the absolute master of the "petitio principii" (begging the question)  fallacy, eh, Six?  E. G. "If Einstein's notions of space and time are correct, then they are correct."

 

 

 

 

No that's called a circular argument. There is nothing circular in the arguments of relativity, they are founded in very long investigations that proceeded Newton and eventually superceded. You cannot accept this. You are lost.

 

Yeah, right.  Rave on.

[Moronium]

 

 

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.1292474

 

As I have noted elsewhere, philosophical positivism had  strong grip on the philosophy of science until around 1950, when it was repudiated.  If you want to talk about concepts that are "outdated," Six, then maybe you should actually acquaint yourself with both modern science and the history of science.

 

 

 

The citation there is to an article published in the journal "Physics Today" in 2000 and was authored by Gerald Holton, a Professor of Physics and professor of history of science at Harvard University.  Among other things, Holton talks about Einstein's abandonment of his early positivism:

 

...I had a first, accidental encounter with Heisenberg himself. I had been invited to lecture [in December, 1965, at a UNESCO conference]  on Einstein’s epistemology, focusing on his pilgrimage from an early positivism, strongly influenced by Ernst Mach, to a rational realism close to that of Max Planck.  On finishing my lecture, I left the podium, the next speaker came forward, and we met midway. It was Heisenberg. He seemed pleased, and in passing whispered to me, "We must talk afterwards.” I shall return to this encounter later.  

 

Early in his years at Munich, Heisenberg went with some friends on a bicycle tour around Lake Walchensee. The talk turned to Sommerfeld’s relativity course, and Heisenberg was especially struck by a remark from his friend Otto Laporte, recalling it later as follows:

 

"We ought only to use such words and concepts as can be directly related to sense perception. . . .Such concepts can be understood without extensive explanation. It is precisely this return to what is observable that is Einstein’s great merit. In his  relativity theory, he quite rightly started with the commonplace statement that time is what you read on a clock. If you would keep to such commonplace meaning of words, you will have no difficulties with relativity theory. As soon as a theory allows us to predict correctly the result of observations, it gives us all the understanding we need."

 

This “instrumentalist” or “operational” view of Einstein’s method was quite common at that time, and for decades afterwards."

 

.....Einstein, whose development away from positivistic instrumentalism to a rational realism had escaped Heisenberg’s notice, went on to explain at length how complicated any observation is in general, how it involves assumptions about phenomena that in turn are based on theories.....Perhaps this discussion helped Heisenberg eventually to embark on his own epistemological pilgrimage, which ultimately ended with a kind of neo-Platonism.

 

 

Six obviously has no interest in such matters, which is appropriate, I guess, because by every indication he would be completely incapable of understanding them anyway.

 

I won't try to get into it here, but the copenhagen interpretation which was widely accepted while physics was under the pernicious influence of positivism as the proper philosophy of science, has since been widely debated.  Many mistakenly assert that J.S. Bell's theorem and "Bell's inequaltiy" "proved" the Copenhagen interpretation to be correct.  This is despite the fact that Bell himself rejected that conclusion.  But again, that's getting rather far afield in this thread.

Edited May 15, 2018 by Moronium

[Moronium]

I will nonetheless submit a few excerpts from a wiki article to support my assertion:

 

The Copenhagen interpretation is an expression of the meaning of quantum mechanicsthat was largely devised in the years 1925 to 1927 by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. It remains one of the most commonly taught interpretations of quantum mechanics....

 

There have been many objections to the Copenhagen interpretation over the years. These include: discontinuous jumps when there is an observation, the probabilistic element introduced upon observation, the subjectiveness of requiring an observer, the difficulty of defining a measuring device, and the necessity of invoking classical physics to describe the "laboratory" in which the results are measured.

 

Alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation include the many-worlds interpretation, the De Broglie–Bohm (pilot-wave) interpretation, and quantum decoherence theories.

 

Throughout much of the twentieth century the Copenhagen interpretation had overwhelming acceptance among physicists...[but] astrophysicist and science writer John Gribbin described it as having fallen from primacy after the 1980s...[but there are indications to the contrary, it goes on to say].  In a 2017 article, physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg states that the Copenhagen interpretation "is now widely felt to be unacceptable."^[47]

 

Metaphysics of the wave function:

 

The Copenhagen interpretation denies that the wave function provides a directly apprehensible image of an ordinary material body or a discernible component of some such,^[or anything more than a theoretical concept.

 

In metaphysical terms, the Copenhagen interpretation views quantum mechanics as providing knowledge of phenomena, but not as pointing to 'really existing objects', which it regarded as residues of ordinary intuition. This makes it an epistemic theory. This may be contrasted with Einstein's view, that physics should look for 'really existing objects', making itself an ontic theory.^[18]

 

Some authors have proposed that Bohr was influenced by positivism (or even pragmatism). On the other hand, Bohr and Heisenberg were not in complete agreement, and they held different views at different times. Heisenberg in particular was prompted to move towards realism.

 

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation

 

The discussion about metaphysics here reveals that philosophy, in the form of ontology, epistemology, metaphysics (positivism, realism, pragmatism, etc.) plays a strong part in both the formation and the interpretation of any scientific theory.  The average practicing physicist with a B.S. degree does not really acknowledge this and likes to claim that physics deals only in "empirical facts" and has nothing to do with philosophy.  Fraid not.

 

And of course, for people like A-wal who will scream that every fool and his brother knows that the copenhagen interpretation is absolutely true, and that any contrary view is "outdated," there's this:

 

"In a 2017 article, physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg states that the Copenhagen interpretation "is now widely felt to be unacceptable."

Edited May 13, 2018 by Moronium

[Moronium]

Taking this one more step (probably foolishly), here are a couple of excerpts from the article, entitled "The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics" published by the nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg in 2017:

 

Many physicists came to think that the reaction of Einstein and Feynman and others to the unfamiliar aspects of quantum mechanics had been overblown. This used to be my view. After all, Newton’s theories too had been unpalatable to many of his contemporaries. Newton had introduced what his critics saw as an occult force, gravity, which was unrelated to any sort of tangible pushing and pulling, and which could not be explained on the basis of philosophy or pure mathematics...

 

 It is a bad sign that those physicists today who are most comfortable with quantum mechanics do not agree with one another about what it all means....

 

The introduction of probability into the principles of physics was disturbing to past physicists, but the trouble with quantum mechanics is not that it involves probabilities. We can live with that.

 

The trouble is that in quantum mechanics the way that wave functions change with time is governed by an equation, the Schrödinger equation, that does not involve probabilities. It is just as deterministic as Newton’s equations of motion and gravitation. 

 

....What then must be done about the shortcomings of quantum mechanics? One reasonable response is contained in the legendary advice to inquiring students: “Shut up and calculate!” There is no argument about how to use quantum mechanics, only how to describe what it means, so perhaps the problem is merely one of words.

 

On the other hand, the problems of understanding measurement in the present form of quantum mechanics may be warning us that the theory needs modification. 

 

A new theory might be designed...The goal in inventing a new theory is to make this happen not by giving measurement any special status in the laws of physics, but as part of what in the post-quantum theory would be the ordinary processes of physics....One difficulty in developing such a new theory is that we get no direction from experiment—all data so far agree with ordinary quantum mechanics.

 

We do get some help, however, from some general principles, which turn out to provide surprisingly strict constraints on any new theory.  Lately I have been thinking about a possible experimental search for signs of departure from ordinary quantum mechanics in atomic clocks.

 

Quantum mechanical calculations show that in some atomic clocks the tuning should be precise to one part in a hundred million billion, and this precision is indeed realized. But if the corrections to quantum mechanics represented by the new terms in the Lindblad equations (expressed as energies) were as large as one part in a hundred million billion of the energy difference of the atomic states used in the clock, this precision would have been quite lost. The new terms must therefore be even smaller than this.

 

 Regarding not only this issue, but more generally the future of quantum mechanics, I have to echo Viola in Twelfth Night: “O time, thou must untangle this, not I.”

 

 

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/trouble-with-quantum-mechanics/

Edited May 13, 2018 by Moronium

[Moronium]

A little more on modern thought, relativity, philosophy, logical positivism and it's decline, John Stuart Bell, etc.  These are excerpts from a treatise dealing primarily with Bohm's mechanics,  entitled "Pilot-wave theory, Bohmian metaphysics, and the foundations of quantum mechanics":

 

So far we considered consequences of dropping ‘logical positivism’ (science must be about things that can be observed or measured) in quantum mechanics. Today we shall see positivism had an equally essential role in the epistemological foundations of relativity; the consequences of dispensing with it are very interesting indeed!

 

This philosophical event has largely gone unnoticed in theoretical physics. In realizing positivism must be abandoned, it becomes clear people who study metaphysical questions must no longer automatically be considered by physicists to be nutters.

 

“The central event [in philosophy] during the second half of the twentieth century has been the downfall of positivism and the reopening of virtually all the traditional problems in philosophy.” T. Burge (1992)

 

 

Popper weighs in:

 

“We have to give up Einstein’s interpretation of special relativity and return to Lorentz’s interpretation and with it to . . . absolute space and time. . . . The reason for this assertion is that the mere existence of an infinite velocity entails [the existence] of an absolute simultaneity and thereby of an absolute space. Whether or not an infinite velocity can be attained in the transmission of signals is irrelevant for this argument: the one inertial system for which Einsteinian simultaneity coincides with absolute simultaneity . . . would be the system at absolute rest - whether or not this system of absolute rest can be experimentally identified.” (Karl Popper, 1982).

 

 

 

John Stuart Bell's thoughts:

 

“I think it’s a deep dilemma, and the resolution of it will not be trivial; it will require a substantial change in the way we look at things. But I would say that the cheapest resolution is something like going back to relativity as it was before Einstein, when people like Lorentz and Poincare thought that there was an aether - a preferred frame of reference - but that our measuring instruments were distorted by motion in such a way that we could not detect motion through the aether. . . . that is certainly the cheapest solution.

 

Behind the apparent Lorentz invariance of the phenomena, there is a deeper level which is not Lorentz invariant. . . . what is not sufficiently emphasized in textbooks, in my opinion, is that the pre-Einstein position of Lorentz and Poincare, Larmor and Fitzgerald was perfectly coherent, and is not inconsistent with relativity theory. The idea that there is an aether, and these Fitzgerald contractions and Larmor dilations occur, and that as a result the instruments do not detect motion through the aether - that is a perfectly coherent point of view. . . . The reason I want to go back to the idea of an aether here is because in these EPR experiments there is the suggestion that behind the scenes something is going faster than light. Now if all Lorentz frames are equivalent, that also means that things can go backwards in time. . . . [this] introduces great problems, paradoxes of causality, and so on. And so it is precisely to avoid these that I want to say there is a real causal sequence which is defined in the aether.”  J.S. Bell (1986, Interview in Davis and Brown’s The Ghost in the Atom)

 

 

 

Back to the author:

 

Philosophy important in doing physics?

 

We have seen that a dogmatic insistence on fundamental Lorentz invariance can lead pilot-wave theorists astray. Our built-in beliefs based on Minkowski spacetime encourage us to believe every particle must have its own ‘personal time’, and that Ψ(x1, x2, . . . , xN, t) which appears to have a global absolute time must be radically restructured. Not the case if we adopt the (perfectly coherent) viewpoint of Lorentzian relativity; then relativistic Bohmian theories become Lorentz invariant ‘on average’. 

 

Philosophical musings thus encourage us to be more flexible. Some authors go a little bit further: ‘A radical rethinking of quantum gravity: rejecting Einstein’s relativity and unifying Bohmian quantum mechanics with a Bell-neo-Lorentzian absolute time, space and gravity’ Quentin Smith, in Einstein, Relativity, and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge, 2008)

 

 

 

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/PWT/lectures/bohm5.pdf

 

Again, probably not a topic of much concern or interest to posters here.  But it should be obvious that the choice between SR and Lorentzian (PFT) relativity, although primarily a philosophical one, can make a huge difference in over-all physical theory, with ramifications reaching far beyond SR itself

Edited May 13, 2018 by Moronium

[Moronium]

Now we can have an informed discussion.  

 

 

Discussion?  Around here?  I've seen very little of that.

[marcospolo]

Or you are all wrong.  And have based your "knowledge" on prior guesswork, which is irrational or flawed.

Fairies, goblins, magic, Planck length, quantum foam, space-time....  all just one in that same.

 

This is possible, and if so would explain a lot about why modern Physics is in such a mess.

 

Distance exists as a comparison between objects, (or objects size)  related to other objects, we measure it to help us understand the scale of things.

If we stop measuring things, the things stay where they were regardless. (ignoring motion for now)

But Time is not like distance.

We measure things in motion for comparison with other things in motion, to get a sense of scale of that process of motion, or rate of change in the properties of objects.

But with Time, unlike Distance, the relationship between the objects is only valid for the precise instant that we measured it. It is only a measurer of the condition of objects or properties of objects as they are NOW.

 

There is only NOW.  

 

A moment ago is no longer existing, and tomorrow also does not exist.  Despite what Einstein claimed. (without offering any explanation of how that could happen, or any way to test the idea)

 

So therefore its impossible to dilate NOW, or to travel away from NOW, or go back to a memory of yesterday.

 

Time does not therefore exist like slices on a loaf of bread, cut at different angles for everyone, this is crazy talk by professors desperately trying to prop up a failed theory.

 

NOW is absolute and universal. If you froze the universe, all you have is NOW. and its the same now across the entire universe.

 

Way too much of modern science is based, for some reason on the work of ignorant people from the 19th century and early 20th century. They came up with a lot of garbage that is now cemented into the doctrines of Physics. 

 

Its all based on speculation, nothing more solid that that.

 

For example, no man alive or dead has an explanation of  how light works. All the theories fail under test.  Yet their failed theories are used as a frame work for further theories.

Naturally you can't get good from bad.

 

The electromagnetic spectrum theory is problematic and leads to more crazy theories like Quantum.

 

If you have no idea why I say that no one understands light, and the EM theory is a problem, then you have not thought about it very hard, you probably have learned rote style the dogma of the church of Scientism.  This is not thinking.

[Moronium]

Time is not a physical entity.  It is a concept, a mental construction.  As some have noted it is an abstraction.  Yet many have a pronounced proclivity for attempting to hypostatize and reify time.  This is a category error and is well recognized as a logical fallacy.

 

"Time" does not slow down or speed up.  Clocks do.  "Spacetime" advocates are notorious purveyors of this fallacy.

 

Reference, from wiki:

 

Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity.

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

[Moronium]

That last post was made without reading this entire thread just the first few posts).  It's been so long that I didn't even remember that I have already commented here at great length.  That last post merely repeats (perhaps, "summarizes") what I have already said in different ways, so it's redundant.

[marcospolo]

Time is not a thing, either a physical thing or a force or field.

Time is a concept of man to help him figure out when to return to the cave for a hot dinner.

 

So Time does not meter out or control the events of the universe. Rather, something happens, then as a consequence the next thing happens. Man counts those events, compares them to similar events counts, and calls that time.

 

For instance, we count how many times the sun rises between the occurrences of the start of winter. This is the beginning of timekeeping.

The sun would still rise 365 times between each winter whether we counted or not.  Simply because of the way the Earth orbits the sun.  Some magic universal timekeeping device is not forcing the Earth to orbit at a certain rate.

 

Events occur one after the other, some related, some just happen. We get older because tiny chemical and electrical events follow the previous event in our bodies, and there is natural entropy.  We don't get older BECAUSE of TIME.    Rather we count and add our degenerative process from birth using the concept of counting man made divisions of the sunrise and sunset. This is what we call the passing of time.  Its just a concept, an invention, a clever way to record our progress, compared to others.

Edited February 12, 2019 by marcospolo