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Cosmologist tells us how time got its arrow

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Lee Smolin, a cosmologist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, informs us via PBS,

I believe in time.

I haven’t always believed in it. Like many physicists and philosophers, I had once concluded from general relativity and quantum gravity that time is not a fundamental aspect of nature, but instead emerges from another, deeper description. Then, starting in the 1990s and accelerated by an eight year collaboration with the Brazilian philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, I came to believe instead that time is fundamental. (How I came to this is another story.) Now, I believe that by taking time to be fundamental, we might be able to understand how general relativity and the standard model emerge from a deeper theory, why time only goes one way, and how the universe was born.

Something is wrong here. Just recording, just recording…

Re Perimeter Institute: Hi, Nonsense, meet Budget:

Now, here is a completely unscientific speculation: Perimeter was founded in large part from the Blackberry smart phone fortune (a Canadian origin product).

Perimeter currently relies on a variety of funding sources. That said, things are tough all over, and especially for Blackberry, mainly because Silicon Valley briefly put out the bong pipes and narrowed the achievement gap.

See also: How time got its arrow without intelligence (and why that leads to nonsense).

Not to a road to reality:

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Comments
bb:
“Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.'” – John 8:58 (ESV) Either bad grammar, or a profound statement about God outside of time.
Yes. It is indeed an extremely profound statement but I don't think Jesus was talking about God being outside of time. I think it's the opposite. IMO, Jesus was referring to the fact that we live in a true 4-D (not spacetime) universe.Mapou
July 21, 2015
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"Jesus said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.'" - John 8:58 (ESV) Either bad grammar, or a profound statement about God outside of time.bb
July 21, 2015
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I want to know how Cupid got his arrow.
Chronus shot him in the buttmike1962
July 20, 2015
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I want to know how Cupid got his arrow.Mung
July 20, 2015
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Mapou, Thanks, but I think our conversation is over.daveS
July 19, 2015
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daveS, Let me explain to you what you are doing here, just in case you weren't conscious of it. First, you realized that you have no way to refute my simple refutation of your time travel idiocy (read first comment above). Second, you then decide to change the subject and lay out a bunch of crap in order to distract attention from the fact that you cannot refute my simple refutation of time travel. Third, I know I'm a nobody but compared to Karl Popper, what are you again?Mapou
July 19, 2015
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My first question to anyone (Mapou excepted) who doubts time dilation exists is, do you accept the following postulate of special relativity?
The speed of light in free space has the same value c in all inertial frames of reference.
daveS
July 19, 2015
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Time dilation is nonsense of the worst order. The effect (clock slowing) is real but the interpretation (time dilation) is pure unmitigated crackpottery. Time cannot dilate for the simple reason that it cannot change by definition. Clocks and other physical processes slow down for reasons having to do with energy conservation. That is all.Mapou
July 19, 2015
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Moreover, as would be expected if General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were truly unified in the resurrection of Christ from death, the image on the shroud is found to be formed by a quantum process. The image was not formed by a ‘classical’ process:
The absorbed energy in the Shroud body image formation appears as contributed by discrete values – Giovanni Fazio, Giuseppe Mandaglio – 2008 Excerpt: This result means that the optical density distribution,, can not be attributed at the absorbed energy described in the framework of the classical physics model. It is, in fact, necessary to hypothesize a absorption by discrete values of the energy where the ‘quantum’ is equal to the one necessary to yellow one fibril. http://cab.unime.it/journals/index.php/AAPP/article/view/C1A0802004/271 "It is not a continuum or spherical-front radiation that made the image, as visible or UV light. It is not the X-ray radiation that obeys the one over R squared law that we are so accustomed to in medicine. It is more unique. It is suggested that the image was formed when a high-energy particle struck the fiber and released radiation within the fiber at a speed greater that the local speed of light. Since the fiber acts as a light pipe, this energy moved out through the fiber until it encountered an optical discontinuity, then it slowed to the local speed of light and dispersed. The fact that the pixels don’t fluoresce suggests that the conversion to their now brittle dehydrated state occurred instantly and completely so no partial products remain to be activated by the ultraviolet light. This suggests a quantum event where a finite amount of energy transferred abruptly. The fact that there are images front and back suggests the radiating particles were released along the gravity vector. The radiation pressure may also help explain why the blood was "lifted cleanly" from the body as it transformed to a resurrected state." Kevin Moran - optical engineer Scientists say Turin Shroud is supernatural – December 2011 Excerpt: After years of work trying to replicate the colouring on the shroud, a similar image has been created by the scientists. However, they only managed the effect by scorching equivalent linen material with high-intensity ultra violet lasers, undermining the arguments of other research, they say, which claims the Turin Shroud is a medieval hoax. Such technology, say researchers from the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (Enea), was far beyond the capability of medieval forgers, whom most experts have credited with making the famous relic. “The results show that a short and intense burst of UV directional radiation can colour a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin,” they said. And in case there was any doubt about the preternatural degree of energy needed to make such distinct marks, the Enea report spells it out: “This degree of power cannot be reproduced by any normal UV source built to date.” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-say-turin-shroud-is-supernatural-6279512.html
Personally, considering the extreme difficulty that many brilliant minds have had in trying to reconcile Quantum Mechanics and special relativity, i.e. QED, with Gravity, I consider the preceding nuance on the Shroud of Turin to be a subtle, but powerful, evidence substantiating Christ’s primary claim as to being our Savior from sin, death, and hell: Verses:
John 8:23-24 But he continued, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins. Matthew 10:28 “Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
Of supplemental note: The overturning of the Copernican Principle and the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead as the correct solution for the 'theory of everything': https://docs.google.com/document/d/17u0srH9x3kUiei43aOHoKolLsRERhPpUfI9WNhxyLrE/edit Moreover, in stark contrast to multiverse (and Darwinian) claims, for which we have no direct observational evidence, we have actual observational evidence from Near Death Experience testimonies of eternity and also of people going through a tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension,,,
‘In the ‘spirit world,,, instantly, there was no sense of time. See, everything on earth is related to time. You got up this morning, you are going to go to bed tonight. Something is new, it will get old. Something is born, it’s going to die. Everything on the physical plane is relative to time, but everything in the spiritual plane is relative to eternity. Instantly I was in total consciousness and awareness of eternity, and you and I as we live in this earth cannot even comprehend it, because everything that we have here is filled within the veil of the temporal life. In the spirit life that is more real than anything else and it is awesome. Eternity as a concept is awesome. There is no such thing as time. I knew that whatever happened was going to go on and on.’ In The Presence Of Almighty God – The NDE of Mickey Robinson – video “I started to move toward the light. The way I moved, the physics, was completely different than it is here on Earth. It was something I had never felt before and never felt since. It was a whole different sensation of motion. I obviously wasn’t walking or skipping or crawling. I was not floating. I was flowing. I was flowing toward the light. I was accelerating and I knew I was accelerating, but then again, I didn’t really feel the acceleration. I just knew I was accelerating toward the light. Again, the physics was different – the physics of motion of time, space, travel. It was completely different in that tunnel, than it is here on Earth. I came out into the light and when I came out into the light, I realized that I was in heaven.” Barbara Springer – Near Death Experience – The Tunnel – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv2jLeoAcMI Life After Life – Raymond Moody – Near Death Experience – The Tunnel, The Light, The Life Review – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z56u4wMxNlg
bornagain77
July 19, 2015
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as to:
"How do ID proponents feel about GR and time travel?"
Time dilation and GR? I'm a fan. Time travel? Not a fan.
The God of the Mathematicians - The religious beliefs that guided Kurt Gödel’s revolutionary Ideas by David P. Goldman - August 2010 Excerpt: In a Festschrift for Einstein’s seventieth birthday in 1949, Gödel demonstrated the possibility of a special case in which, as Palle Yourgrau described the result, “the large-scale geometry of the world is so warped that there exist space-time curves that bend back on themselves so far that they close; that is, they return to their starting point.” This means that “a highly accelerated spaceship journey along such a closed path, or world line, could only be described as time travel.” In fact, “Gödel worked out the length and time for the journey, as well as the exact speed and fuel requirements.” Gödel, of course, did not actually believe in time travel, but he understood his paper to undermine the Einsteinian worldview from within. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/08/the-god-of-the-mathematicians
The following study, through a fairly ingenious thought experiment, challenged the assumption of length contraction as being valid for 'photon clocks'. In doing so, they cleared up some loose ends in relativity concerning time's relation to space. Loose ends that had been ample fodder for much of the speculation of time travel being possible in relativity:
Physicists continue work to abolish time as fourth dimension of space - April 2012 Excerpt: “The rate of photon clocks in faster inertial systems will not slow down with regard to the photon clocks in a rest inertial system because the speed of light is constant in all inertial systems,” he said. “The rate of atom clocks will slow down because the 'relativity' of physical phenomena starts at the scale of pi mesons.” He also explained that, without length contraction, time dilation exists but in a different way than usually thought. “Time dilatation exists not in the sense that time as a fourth dimension of space dilates and as a result the clock rate is slower,” he explained. “Time dilatation simply means that, in a faster inertial system, the velocity of change slows down and this is valid for all observers.,, Our research confirms Gödel's vision: time is not a physical dimension of space through which one could travel into the past or future.” http://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-space.html
As well, to borrow Frank Tipler’s title (but not his ideas) from his book, in so far as the “Physics of Immortality” are concerned, I’ve found general relativity and special relativity to lend strong support for the Theistic contention of eternal life after death. In Theism, particularly Christian Theism, it is held that there are two ultimate destinies for our eternal souls. Heaven or Hell! And in physics we find two very different ‘eternities’ just as Theism has held for millenia. One eternity in physics is found ‘if’ a hypothetical observer were to accelerate to the speed of light. In this scenario time, as we understand it, would come to a complete stop for the hypothetical observer. To grasp the whole ‘time coming to a complete stop at the speed of light’ concept a little more easily, imagine moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light. Would not the hands on the clock stay stationary as you moved away from the face of the clock at the speed of light? Moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light happens to be the same ‘thought experiment’ that gave Einstein his breakthrough insight into e=mc2.
Albert Einstein – Special Relativity – Insight into Eternity – ‘thought experiment’ – video (6:00 minute mark) https://youtu.be/jHnRqhnkyGs?t=364 "I've just developed a new theory of eternity." Albert Einstein - The Einstein Factor - Reader's Digest - 2005 "The laws of relativity have changed timeless existence from a theological claim to a physical reality. Light, you see, is outside of time, a fact of nature proven in thousands of experiments at hundreds of universities. I don’t pretend to know how tomorrow can exist simultaneously with today and yesterday. But at the speed of light they actually and rigorously do. Time does not pass." Richard Swenson - More Than Meets The Eye, Chpt. 12
This higher dimension, ‘eternal’, inference for the time framework of light is also warranted, by logic, because light is not ‘frozen within time’, i.e. light appears to move to us in our temporal framework of time, yet it is shown that time, as we understand it, does not pass for light. The only way this is possible is if light is indeed of a higher dimensional value of time than our temporal time is otherwise light would simply be ‘frozen in time’ to our temporal frame of reference. Another line of evidence that supports the inference that ‘tomorrow can exist simultaneously with today and yesterday’, at the ‘eternal’ speed of light, is visualizing what would happen if a hypothetical observer were to approach the speed of light. Please note, at the 3:22 minute mark of the following video, when the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape as a ‘hypothetical’ observer moves towards the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light, (Of note: This following video was made by two Australian University Physics Professors with a supercomputer.).
Approaching The Speed Of Light - Optical Effects – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQnHTKZBTI4
Moreover, as with any observer accelerating to the speed of light, it is found that for any ‘hypothetical’ observer falling to the event horizon of a black hole, that time, as we understand it, will come to a complete stop for them. This is because the accelerative force of gravity at black holes is so intense that not even light can escape its grip:
Space-Time of a Black hole - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0VOn9r4dq8
— But of particular interest to the ‘eternal framework’ found for General Relativity at black holes;… It is interesting to note that entropic decay (Randomness), which is the primary reason why things grow old and eventually die in this universe, is found to be greatest at black holes. Thus the ‘eternity of time’ at black holes can rightly be called ‘eternities of decay and/or eternities of destruction’.
Entropy of the Universe - Hugh Ross - May 2010 Excerpt: Egan and Lineweaver found that supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to the observable universe’s entropy. They showed that these supermassive black holes contribute about 30 times more entropy than what the previous research teams estimated. http://www.reasons.org/entropy-universe Roger Penrose – How Special Was The Big Bang? “But why was the big bang so precisely organized, whereas the big crunch (or the singularities in black holes) would be expected to be totally chaotic? It would appear that this question can be phrased in terms of the behaviour of the WEYL part of the space-time curvature at space-time singularities. What we appear to find is that there is a constraint WEYL = 0 (or something very like this) at initial space-time singularities-but not at final singularities-and this seems to be what confines the Creator’s choice to this very tiny region of phase space." "Einstein's equation predicts that, as the astronaut reaches the singularity (of the black-hole), the tidal forces grow infinitely strong, and their chaotic oscillations become infinitely rapid. The astronaut dies and the atoms which his body is made become infinitely and chaotically distorted and mixed-and then, at the moment when everything becomes infinite (the tidal strengths, the oscillation frequencies, the distortions, and the mixing), spacetime ceases to exist." Kip S. Thorne - "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy" pg. 476
i.e. Black Holes are found to be ‘timeless’ singularities of destruction and disorder rather than singularities of creation and order such as the extreme order we see at the creation event of the Big Bang and which is associated with special relativity. Needless to say, the implications of this ‘eternity of destruction’ should be fairly disturbing for those of us who are of the ‘spiritually minded' persuasion! In light of this dilemma that the two very different eternities present to us spiritually minded people, and the fact that Gravity is, in so far as we can tell, completely incompatible with Quantum Mechanics, it is interesting to point out a subtle nuance on the Shroud of Turin. Namely that Gravity was overcome in the resurrection event of Christ:
Particle Radiation from the Body - July 2012 - M. Antonacci, A. C. Lind Excerpt: The Shroud’s frontal and dorsal body images are encoded with the same amount of intensity, independent of any pressure or weight from the body. The bottom part of the cloth (containing the dorsal image) would have born all the weight of the man’s supine body, yet the dorsal image is not encoded with a greater amount of intensity than the frontal image. Radiation coming from the body would not only explain this feature, but also the left/right and light/dark reversals found on the cloth’s frontal and dorsal body images. http://www.academicjournals.org/sre/PDF/pdf2012/30JulSpeIss/Antonacci.pdf A Quantum Hologram of Christ’s Resurrection? by Chuck Missler Excerpt: “You can read the science of the Shroud, such as total lack of gravity, lack of entropy (without gravitational collapse), no time, no space—it conforms to no known law of physics.” The phenomenon of the image brings us to a true event horizon, a moment when all of the laws of physics change drastically. Dame Piczek created a one-fourth size sculpture of the man in the Shroud. When viewed from the side, it appears as if the man is suspended in mid air (see graphic, below), indicating that the image defies previously accepted science. The phenomenon of the image brings us to a true event horizon, a moment when all of the laws of physics change drastically. http://www.khouse.org/articles/2008/847 THE EVENT HORIZON (Space-Time Singularity) OF THE SHROUD OF TURIN. – Isabel Piczek – Particle Physicist Excerpt: We have stated before that the images on the Shroud firmly indicate the total absence of Gravity. Yet they also firmly indicate the presence of the Event Horizon. These two seemingly contradict each other and they necessitate the past presence of something more powerful than Gravity that had the capacity to solve the above paradox. http://shroud3d.com/findings/isabel-piczek-image-formation
bornagain77
July 19, 2015
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computerist,
How do ID proponents feel about GR and time travel? Forwards or backwards time travel is nonsense to me based on simple logic. If one could theoretically travel forward in time, and the universe has a finite end, you could travel to the end of the universe which is nonsense. The same with backwards time travel, if I could travel back in time that would mean I could theoretically travel to the beginning of the universe, no?
What do you think about the twin paradox? Or the Rossi Hall Experiment?daveS
July 19, 2015
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Mapou,
No, thank you.
Ok, fair enough.daveS
July 19, 2015
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How do ID proponents feel about GR and time travel? Forwards or backwards time travel is nonsense to me based on simple logic. If one could theoretically travel forward in time, and the universe has a finite end, you could travel to the end of the universe which is nonsense. The same with backwards time travel, if I could travel back in time that would mean I could theoretically travel to the beginning of the universe, no?computerist
July 19, 2015
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daveS:
Consider the following.
No, thank you.Mapou
July 19, 2015
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Mapou,
Velocity in time would have to be written as v = dt/dt, which is nonsensical. That’s it.
Consider the following. Suppose I am a time traveler, heading into the future at an accelerated rate, say at 100 times the rate that you are. By that I mean that when I look at your watch, it is running 100 times as fast as mine*. If we use t_d and t_M to indicate the times each of us measure, then dt_M / dt_d = 100. I guess you will object that this is not a "velocity", but why would you expect it to be? The point is, it gives a comparison of how fast each of us is moving through time. * If you like, we can do this more formally by comparing my watch to synchronized clocks in your reference frame.daveS
July 19, 2015
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Karl Popper on time and Einstein's block universe:
"At the same time I realized that such myths may be developed, and become testable; that historically speaking all — or very nearly all — scientific theories originate from myths, and that a myth may contain important anticipations of scientific theories. Examples are Empedocles' theory of evolution by trial and error, or Parmenides' myth of the unchanging block universe in which nothing ever happens and which, if we add another dimension, becomes Einstein's block universe (in which, too, nothing ever happens, since everything is, four-dimensionally speaking, determined and laid down from the beginning). I thus felt that if a theory is found to be non-scientific, or "metaphysical" (as we might say), it is not thereby found to be unimportant, or insignificant, or "meaningless," or "nonsensical." But it cannot claim to be backed by empirical evidence in the scientific sense — although it may easily be, in some genetic sense, the "result of observation." Source: Conjectures and Refutations [pdf] by Karl Popper. Emphasis added.
Modern physics is laughable.Mapou
July 19, 2015
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Wow. Smolin seriously scares me. Time is a physical entity and has an arrow? Really? Here is a simple and rock solid refutation of both time and its arrow. If there is a time dimension and we are moving in this dimension in a given direction (time's arrow), then this implies a velocity in time. Now velocity in space is normally given as v = dx/dt. Velocity in time would have to be written as v = dt/dt, which is nonsensical. That's it. Conclusion: There is no time along which we are moving from the past into the future or any direction. It is an illusion and an academic deception meant to safeguard Einsteinian physics and its time travel nonsense. There is only the ever changing present. Joe Rosen said it best:
"What has been has indeed objectively been and is no more. What will be, objectively is not and has not been (and, in fact, is not even fully determined, according to quantum indeterminacy). All physical systems ride the universal wave of becoming. Any awareness (ours or that of other intelligences) of past and future reflects the objective wave of becoming. There is no problem of "the arrow of time." There simply is no arrow of time, as if time could go one "way" rather than another. That metaphor is an unfortunate result of spatializing time. The picture of time as a line along which one might travel in one direction or the other is a conceptual disaster. Time is becoming. Becoming is change. The undoing of a change is also a change. There is no "unbecoming." Source: "Time, c, and nonlocality: A glimpse beneath the surface?" Physics Essays, vol. 7, pp. 335-340, 1994 by Professor Joe Rosen
Smolin? Shmolin.Mapou
July 19, 2015
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