1. The past and the future do not physically exist in the present. But that’s just tautology: the past and the future have different times associated. The fact that choice of time coordinate depends upon the observer and can mix with spatial coordinates indicates that the past and the future do have physical existence, at different values of time.

What do they consist of? Presumably much of the physical material that I was composed of yesterday, is the same material I’m composed of today. Yes, there have been some changes, but is this due to continuous physical interactions with my environment, or because I’m traveling along this other dimension?

2. Time and space are two different aspects of the same thing. The only difference is a sign in the metric. Time doesn’t “do” anything any more than space does. Time, like space, is part of the background within which all of the physical laws of which we are aware act.

Space can be static. The ruler doesn’t have to move to measure it. Time is dynamic. The clock has to move in order to measure it. They are related, because motion requires space, but does space require motion?

3. Yes, you can have both position and momentum. Though through quantum mechanics we can’t measure both to infinite accuracy, particles do indeed have both position and momentum. In the realm where classical mechanics dominates, one cannot fully specify a particle without specifying both its position and momentum. In the realm where quantum mechanical effects need to be taken into account, of course, fully specifying a particle requires only fully specifying the wave function, which may be in position space, momentum space, or a number of other potential spaces or combinations of spaces. But in any case, at any given time, one can make a statement about both the position and momentum of a particle given this wave function (specifically, one can make a statement about the probability distribution of the outcome of measuring one or the other or both).

I did mis-state that; You can’t measure both position and momentum, but the fact still is that time requires change and change means one set of circumstances has been replaced by another and therefore the previous set no longer exists.

The thing is, you are continually neglecting the observed fact of Lorentz invariance. Your idea that time is different would necessarily violate Lorentz invariance, and for your idea to have any merit at all it would need to rest upon an observation of breaking of Lorentz invariance. None of the arguments you have made would require breaking of Lorentz invariance, and therefore none of the arguments you have made are of any relevance.

Alright, math isn’t my strong point. Is time a measure of change, or is change a measure of time? It seems describing time as a dimension is to say that change doesn’t happen. So what is change?

We can describe things in many ways and all of it generally requires the projection of time, but the simple fact is that past and future do not physically exist. That is because what physically exists is the matter and energy in its current state, not all past and potential ones. Space is like a noun; it is. Time is like a verb; it does. A verb is not a noun. You can’t have your cake and eat it to. You can’t have both position and momentum.

This is so wrong on so many levels.

1. The past and the future do not physically exist in the present. But that’s just tautology: the past and the future have different times associated. The fact that choice of time coordinate depends upon the observer and can mix with spatial coordinates indicates that the past and the future do have physical existence, at different values of time.

2. Time and space are two different aspects of the same thing. The only difference is a sign in the metric. Time doesn’t “do” anything any more than space does. Time, like space, is part of the background within which all of the physical laws of which we are aware act.

3. Yes, you can have both position and momentum. Though through quantum mechanics we can’t measure both to infinite accuracy, particles do indeed have both position and momentum. In the realm where classical mechanics dominates, one cannot fully specify a particle without specifying both its position and momentum. In the realm where quantum mechanical effects need to be taken into account, of course, fully specifying a particle requires only fully specifying the wave function, which may be in position space, momentum space, or a number of other potential spaces or combinations of spaces. But in any case, at any given time, one can make a statement about both the position and momentum of a particle given this wave function (specifically, one can make a statement about the probability distribution of the outcome of measuring one or the other or both).

The thing is, you are continually neglecting the observed fact of Lorentz invariance. Your idea that time is different would necessarily violate Lorentz invariance, and for your idea to have any merit at all it would need to rest upon an observation of breaking of Lorentz invariance. None of the arguments you have made would require breaking of Lorentz invariance, and therefore none of the arguments you have made are of any relevance.

We can describe things in many ways and all of it generally requires the projection of time, but the simple fact is that past and future do not physically exist. That is because what physically exists is the matter and energy in its current state, not all past and potential ones. Space is like a noun; it is. Time is like a verb; it does. A verb is not a noun. You can’t have your cake and eat it to. You can’t have both position and momentum.

There are a lot of things that can be proven by repeated observation and experiment that may not be completely true, because all aspects haven’t been taken into account. It has been my personal experience that every day of my life, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Because it repeats with such regularity I can even do other experiments based on it, such as giving an approximate time of day, or being able to determine what direction I’m facing. Does that all prove that it is the sun moving, or am I missing something?

As I keep pointing out, I think that treating time as one dimension is a major flaw in the equations.

Yes, but your objections to this are rather meaningless. You keep ignoring that it’s not time per se, but space-time. This is how reality actually behaves: like space and time are not two fundamentally separate things, but rather different aspects of the same thing. This isn’t faith, it’s a fundamental aspect of Einsteinian relativity, the reality of which has been confirmed again and again in experiment after experiment.

As I have already stated, it is possible that this is due to the collective action of some interactions we have not yet described, but it is [i]not[/i] possible that it is due to the collective action of interactions which we already know how to properly describe. It is because you are focusing on the action of particles whose behavior we already know how to accurately describe, and because you aren’t considering space to be on the same footing as time, that I state that your objections are bunk.

Yes, I’m perfectly aware that “time is treated as a dimension in the field equations which govern the interactions themselves.”

As I’ve pointed out, the equations are a model of reality, not an ideal form of it, even if some people(re; Max Tegmark) think they are. They don’t govern anything, they attempt to describe it and given that the two main models don’t even fit together, they obviously don’t do a complete job of that. As I keep pointing out, I think that treating time as one dimension is a major flaw in the equations.

You are exactly right; “that time is a dimension is, instead, an assumption that goes into the equations to begin with.” Time as a dimension is an assumption. As I pointed out in my more detailed effort to present my observation, it isn’t just one dimension, but every clock and every potential clock is its own dimension. The reason they work together is that similar effects yield similar results and nearly identical effects yield nearly identical results.

I realize you are not about to question your own faith in the equations, as it is likely bound to your basic sense of identity, but realize you have to give me some reason to further question my own point, beyond saying that it is just not the way it’s done.

We’ve had this discussion before, but there remains a fundamental flaw in your analysis. You assume that the appearance of time as a dimension is a result of interactions. The problem with this assumption is that time is treated as a dimension in the field equations which govern the interactions themselves.

Now, there may yet be interactions which we do not yet know how to describe which produce space-time as an emergent property. But time is not an emergent property of the physical laws that we know so far: that time is a dimension is, instead, an assumption that goes into the equations to begin with.

Specific localizations are what we actually observe

I admit I don’t follow all the debates on the issue, since much of it is conjecture based on some intial assumptions that I feel to be wrong, but I do think some of these problems might be cleared up if we don’t try modeling time as a form of linear dimension.

Think for a moment about a thermodynamic medium, say a pot of hot water, with lots of water molecules moving about. It might be compared to a crowd of people moving about in a room. Now if one were to construct a time keeping device out of this situation, we might take the motion of one of these points of reference and measure it against the medium it is moving through. A more general model might take several of these measurements and average them out.
The point is the hand and the medium is the face of the clock. Obviously all the other points are hands of their own clocks, but are medium/face for all other clocks. As Newton pointed out, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” So the motion of any point/hand is balanced by the reaction of the medium/face of the clock. To the hand of the clock, the face goes counterclockwise.
Now time is assumed to be a dimension because it only goes from past circumstances to future ones. As I’ve pointed out previously though, these circumstances go from being in the future to being in the past. Tomorrow, today will be yesterday. Going back to the thermodynamic medium, at any one moment, the positions of all these points constitute an event, so while any and all of them go from past events to future ones, the medium against which any point is being judged is the overall context, which once created, is displaced by the next, as all these individual points move around.
So the illusion of dimension is created because the physical reality of the points moves one way through the series of circumstances, but they are created by motion, rather then the basis for it, so to the extent time is a dimension of events, they go from future to past.
Now put this in the context of the collapsing wave paradigm; Because it is assumed time is a fundamental dimension, it is modeled as a wave of potentialities that collapses into actual circumstance. So how do we tie this one dimension to the whole range of interaction occuring simultaniously? We model it as a series of collapsing events in a linear narrative, Say the quantum event, the bottle of poison, the cat, the box, our eyes. This narrative is simply the stream of specific detail, much like a particular molecule traveling through the larger medium and the series of encounters involved. Yet, as I pointed out in that description, there are innumerable other points of reference also describing their own narrative and all this activity exists in an equilibrium, so there are waves of all these other narratives crashing around and nothing really collapses to a point, just continues on its merry way, because every narrative amounts to its own particular dimension, going its own particular way and there is no one dimension of time.
I’ll leave it at this and see if it makes any sense to you….

You misunderstood my point about empirical results. When I said “I” for an experiment, I didn’t mean, my personal subjective experiences as such, but the *public* results like the pattern of hits on a screen. That is “real” in any rational person’s world, and not something to be BSed off as “illusion” or whatever effete post-modern pretension. Of course that might conflict with “common sense” and down goes common sense, since I fully accept the bizarre world of quantum mechanical *results.* But if “results” conflict with “theories” then to hell with the theories. If you really think that I should even consider public results to be “illusions” and discarded in favor of what some vain theorists want to consider that things “ought” to be like (as do the hard-line multiple-worlds crackpots), then you’d be a crank (and I get the impression that you aren’t.)

PS: From Belize?

I still can’t predict what *I’m* going to see with such notions, which is what “science” is supposed to be all about.

No. That’s the old-fashioned operationalist/instramentalist (Logical Positivism applied to physics) view of science. Science is not about predicting personal experiences, it is about finding patterns in nature. If the deepest pattern (i.e. that with the most explanatory power) conflicts with our common sense intuitions about reality, we need to discard our intuitions.

Whatever happened to empiricism, logical positivism, etc?

Logical Positivism and its ilk are moribund ideas (if they live at all) in that some of their fundamental postulates are problematic. For example, the axiom that “there is no reality beyond our sense experiences” has hard time explaining quantum computation, as the computations themselves cannot be observed — only the final output. The Logical Positivists axiom that “any statement that is not experimentally verifiable is meaningless” falls when applied to itself.

Feynman once pointed out this silly fallacy by saying: Right before this lecture I got into a taxi cab that had a this particular license plate. Isn’t it amazing that of all possible plates it was gonna be just this particular one? Now calculate the chances of this happenning by coincidence!

You would not be so kind if she was, say, a church-goer.

Collapses/localizations are a bizarre and logically absurd feature of the like-it-or-not *universe* we actually live in, for honest folk to acknowledge first and foremost even if *maybe* explainable in a sincere sense someday. Decoherence is a circular argument using the surreptitious putting in by hand of the very events it is presuming to explain.

IF ONLY physicists would realise what quantum theory and experiment has been shouting at them in their faces for nearly a hundred years now: nature is fundamentally random. Nature is continually choosing, for no reason whatsoever, one of many possible branches on which to travel further.

This doesn’t appear to be the case. There is no need to assume that there is any such thing as wave function collapse. If we leave that out of the theory, the appearance of collapse arises naturally from the other axioms. It comes in when you pay close attention to how the environment acts with the particles in question. By including these interactions, we find a thermodynamic effect that mucks with the phase of various parts of the same wave function, preventing coherent interference. Once a wave function has so decohered, it can never interact with itself again. To an observer which is represented by any piece of the wave function that has decohered, it will appear as if the other pieces of the wave function don’t exist at all. This is known as quantum decoherence.

Since there is no need to assume that there is any such thing as wave function collapse, then, Occam’s Razor tells us we should reject it.

Glib talk of our most fundamental experiences (in the classic shared scientific sense too, not the highly individual/subjective sense) as being “illusions” is presumptous and so antithetical to the orginal spirit of empiricism - I see no reason to surrender the empirical given to a bunch of affectedly too-clever-by-half, post-modern pseudoscientists. If you or I decide to do an experiment, you or I will get such and such result. Denying that is crank science of another sort. Why don’t all the neo-atheists who gripe about “woo-woo-ism” whenever it might support “purpose” in the universe, jump on this flaky indulgence? For the same reason political partisans ignore anything wrong their own party does, etc.

No offense to you Iblis - I always got the impression you’re sincere and guileless. If you really believe in that mess, well OK some dig surreal fantasy worlds of physics even though the “real” world is biting us very differently in the @$$. Actually, I wish you’d post again to your interesting blog, but here’s another request for now: take a critical look at what I’ve been ragging against and tell me if you really still think it’s attractive in the sense of being valid, not in the sense of providing “relief” from being irritated by the inexplicable (like WF collapse, which a real man or woman just says “it is what it is…”)

Say, can you or anyone else make out and critique what Greg is trying to say about different rates of free fall not really being different in the sense that matters? He seems hip to the high-brow theory, but to be torturing the semantics.

Marius: I had forgotten about him, but did find the quote “The political class that rules always feels there is one set of rules for the plebes and another set for themselves.” at http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/02/one-law-for-us-another-for-you.html which BTW is very interesting commentary, and before that I heard it or similar somewhere (Will Rogers?) Say, if you’re into this stuff, what do you think of these issues?

H|psi>=0

H|psi&gt=0

Time evolution is an illusion. You exist now and you have a copies that exist yesterday and tomorrow etc. There exists a mapping that preserves information which we call “time evolution”…

Actually, in practice we can’t even measure the form of the wave functions themselves (even if we can create specific ones like a linear polarized photon at 20 degrees) so their having a particular deterministic magnitude at each moment of time is not really effectively/knowably “there” but just assumed for mathematical modelling. Consider for example, we can’t find the absolute phase of a single photon, which means it isn’t “given” the way the equation of a sine or other wave is an explicit and exact amplitude being function of space and time. We don’t know exactly when the photon was emitted, or its exact coherence length (number of “wavings” from the Fourier composition) and ergo it does not even constitue an exact mathematical function of a “wave.” So, even that pretense isn’t really true in any *meaningful* sense. Whatever happened to empiricism, logical positivism, etc? It looks like “the rules are for the plebes” to many theorists.

The universe can’t follow an algorithm, since true probabilistic collapse events and decays etc. are really not produced by any algorithm.

But, as you are probably aware, the evolution of multiverse of the Many Worlds interpretation is fully determined. Its evolution can therefore be expressed as an algorithm.