Wayne

I hope all goes well. Good luck with the operation.

I wanted to tell you I have to have the second spinal operation in six months (for a thoracic disc herniation I got doing heavy lifting overseas) later this week.

So, I’ll look in on the blog as I can, but my participation will be more “off and on” for a while. I find participation on Sean’s blog to be very informative, interesting and a real pleasure!

Best, Sam

The point I’ve been making is that time is a consequence of motion, rather than the basis for it. Yes, the relationship is mathematically precise, but than so is the relationship between temperature and volume space, but we don’t argue temperature is an additional parameter of volume space, as we argue that time is an additional dimension of distance space.

The difference between viewing time as a consequence of motion, rather than the basis for it is that as motion forms specific configurations, it then changes to new configurations. So to the extent that reality would simply be energy defining space, the events being created go from future potential to past circumstance. Therefore, as a measure and description of motion, rather than the basis for it, the series of events called time actually goes future to past, as the physical reality goes the other way, from past events to future ones.

As I’ve pointed out, this affects various conundrums from Zeno’s Paradox to the Uncertainty Principle, since it would be meaningless to describe the present as a point because this would be equivalent to a temperature of absolute zero and reality would cease to exist.

Just as the water goes downhill and the waterfall goes uphill, to the hands of the clock, it is the face that is going counterclockwise, from future to past. As the earth and sun go from past days to future ones, these days go from being in the future to being in the past. Even a vibrating string goes from past vibrations to future ones, as these vibrations which define it go from being in the future to being in the past. Energy goes past to future, as the information defining it goes from future to past.

It’s clear you understand the concept quite well, and remembered that I said that the whole basis of existence in this kind of a universe is the observation of “action” on a complex set of particulate 4D event horizon surfaces at a specific set of coordinates in the manifold…therefore talking about observing the whole structure as blowing us away was an oxymoron (I won’t check it, but I think that’s the word)…an impossibility. Observing the while thing would be like being 250 feet from an exploding 100 megaton nuke!…just a flash of light- no experience at all!

I believe one of the secrets of staying “open” is not taking ourselves too seriously…being able to have a good laugh, and appreciate what Stephen Hawking said even more…”The universe just IS”. Understanding the universe might bring some kind of personal satisfaction and lead to a great technology, but so what? In the end, those things exist somewhere in the manifold anyway. I don’t think these great scientific triumphs are any more cosmologically significant than the first reproducing organism, or the first organic molecule. When we measure anything, the units we select and what we observe are in a sense arbitrary- related only to the way the universe is observed from an assigned or selected frame.

I don’t doubt you for a minute when you observe that there seems to be something very special about time as opposed to the other spatial dimensions. I think however that the fact that treating time as spacelike in GR gives precise solutions IS significant. If time, as stange as it seems to us, really had a different “essence” we would logically expect that using time as a simple spacelike dimension in GR would affect the predictive capacity of the concept- and it does not.

Relativity is totally incredible…

I know you understand how opposites define reality, the two sides of the merry-go-round going opposite directions, the water going downstream, as the falls works its way upstream, but I’m still trying to make the point that the dimensional description of reality is a static model, not the actual basis of reality and it doesn’t effectively describe the consequences of a dynamic process.
It is natural to think of time as a dimension. It is the basis of narrative, but as the physicists like to point out, perception and reality are not always the same thing.

The double meaning was intended!…Sam

Our brains model reality as reductionist dimensional structures because we could not process the amount of input otherwise. It’s static modeling of dynamic reality. Science is determined to develop a static description of reality. A God’s eye view. There is no such “universe as it actually exists.”

I tend toward a feral view of informational complexity. What can be created, will also be destroyed.