Philosophy Discussion Forums

Calrid wrote: (Nested quote removed.)

Let's see, a circle and a center. Which one is closer?????????????????????????????

AB1OB wrote: (Nested quote removed.)


Let's see, a circle and a center. Which one is closer?????????????????????????????

If "you" are on a the edge of a circle which one is closer? This is not hard to understand I don't get your confusion?

Perhaps one of the most simple questions I have ever asked?

360 observers placed in position of a circle with a light bulb exactly in the center of the circle... Which observer sees the light first? Why?

hint: http://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=21368

The more we know, the more we know that we don't know anything.

[quote="AB1OB"]

"You are an observer inside the system of reality. You observe things happen in a sequential order (time).

Your virtual existence is within your own consciousness, as is everything that you observe.

Matter is energy that maintains its structure (organization) over duration.

Light is an effect that is produced from Matter. It therefore can produce an image of the source Matter.

This image maintains its relativity to the organization (structure) of the matter it came from but is expanded over duration.

This expansion allows it to move towards future observers. When the Light arrives at an observer, the more expansion that has occured will mean the observer is receiving a smaller percentage of the light. Therfore, the farther an image travels, the smaller it looks".. [/quote]

"Light is an effect that is produced from Matter. It therefore can produce an image of the source Matter."

Then you are talking about Light's effects. Matter is an effect of Light. Motion, time, everything, are effects of Light. What you see as light, something maybe appearing as apparently brighter or hotter, perhaps, than appearing object/events/sensed thoughts (generally everything existing), then this "light" factor is itself an effect of Light. It is the vibration of waves (the effect of Light), when vibrating at an intense rate, which will burn the retina of your eyes. However, the eyes themselves (which, as objects, vibrate at a lessor rate than light-waves), are also an effect of Light.

So the entire premise of your particular "light" is flawed, which makes the entire idea of matter flawed. So what is mainly discussed in this forum are the effects of Light including speed (and therefore time).

What makes the constant speed of light weird is that it's apparent motion is toward the eye. Not away from it, as it is for rocks thrown from a moving boat. If the boat is moving, how could all rocks thrown at the boat be of the same speed? To compensate for the weirdness there is the phenomenon of the blue/red shift of the wavelength of light. For a circular plate-shaped galaxy, the side that is moving toward us is blue shifted and the side moving away is red shifted, both compared to the center of the galaxy. What the shifts indicate is that the distance to the blue side appears to be (is?) *shorter* than to the red side, and the light gets here sooner from the blue side and later from the red side, probably by a week or more.

Geordie Ross wrote: (Nested quote removed.)


"Light does not travel"- "all mass is light", therefore, either mass does not move, or light does indeed travel.

You say water is light, yet it "changes direction" when it changes state, how can something that doesn't move change direction?

Its nonsensical drivel.

Water is an effect of light. Effects are the movement. Motion (what all matter is) is the effect of Light (cause).

"The speed of light is constant. Speed is distance over time. So, if the speed of light is constant, and one element of that speed is time, then a minute is always the same for every beam of light. That is, there is an absolute or a correct time."

Suggest you read up about the Special Theory of Relativity.

"a minute is always the same for every beam of light" makes no sense.

For a beam of light, traveling at the speed of light, time in fact does not pass at all - in other words, if you could travel at the speed of light then for you there would be no elapsed time between the start and end of your journey - you would be the same age when you arrive at your destination as you were when you left your starting point. To a stationary observer your journey takes a finite amount of time - but to you (traveling at the speed of light) your trip would in effect be instantaneous.

It's counter-intuitive, which is why many people cannot accept it. But its true.

Yadayada wrote:What makes the constant speed of light weird is that it's apparent motion is toward the eye. Not away from it, as it is for rocks thrown from a moving boat. If the boat is moving, how could all rocks thrown at the boat be of the same speed? To compensate for the weirdness there is the phenomenon of the blue/red shift of the wavelength of light.

M31.gif

For a circular plate-shaped galaxy, the side that is moving toward us is blue shifted and the side moving away is red shifted, both compared to the center of the galaxy. What the shifts indicate is that the distance to the blue side appears to be (is?) *shorter* than to the red side, and the light gets here sooner from the blue side and later from the red side, probably by a week or more.

Yada my old friend. I was thinking about you today and wondering if you were still alive. I thought I might go looking for you and felt sure I'd find you lurking somewhere.

What are we going to do about this constant speed of light, surely the most illogical construct in all of physics along with all the other spurious constants? How can there be such a thing as a constant in a relativistic universe? How can physics lay claim to being a science? Surely if physicists want to claim the status of a science for their discipline don't they first have to assume that the universe is knowable? By definition a physical constant is a value of unknowable origin and therefore they seek to explain the knowable on the basis of unknowable premises. This strikes me as a more appropriate definition for a religion than it is for a science. This statement is unlikely to go down well with the high priests of physics but they are a notoriously hubristic lot as we both know. I've had no end of scorn heaped on me by daring to question the ontological status of spacetime but such vanities as defining ones terms are regarded as superfluous to those who can so easily hypnotise themselves with their own mathematical virtuosity.

Would you not agree that if space is not physical it has no place in a physical model of our universe? And what of time? Would you not agree that time is either one thing and one thing only or else it doesn't exist at all? Special relativity uses two different ontologies of time within the same model and neither of these ontologies is compatible with the experimentally validated conclusions of General Relativity. Quantum Mechanics, the final refuge of the committed fundamentalists of this bizarre priesthood, doesn't bother much about an ontology of time at all.

What can do about all this, yada, when the bloody obvious stares us in the face? We live in a temporal world and allow the time-deniers to explain the nature of reality to us. When their models make no sense they say too bad. Only a handful of supergeeks can understand this stuff and the rest of us are simply too stupid. The mathematical models say our universe is incomprehensible by definition and therefore it must be so. Plato would boot them fair up the ****, would he not? He'd say, "stand aside, you paddlers in my pool, how dare you attempt to answer a metaphysical question with such inappropriate tools? Let me have a go."

Regards Leo

If space and time are equivalent and light does not experience time how can light be said to travel? We assume light travels but we never observe it travelling. We only ever see it arrive. Light is relationship between objects of mass it can not exist independently.

Yadayada wrote:What makes the constant speed of light weird is that it's apparent motion is toward the eye. Not away from it, as it is for rocks thrown from a moving boat. If the boat is moving, how could all rocks thrown at the boat be of the same speed? To compensate for the weirdness there is the phenomenon of the blue/red shift of the wavelength of light.

M31.gif

For a circular plate-shaped galaxy, the side that is moving toward us is blue shifted and the side moving away is red shifted, both compared to the center of the galaxy. What the shifts indicate is that the distance to the blue side appears to be (is?) *shorter* than to the red side, and the light gets here sooner from the blue side and later from the red side, probably by a week or more.

It's called red/blue shift or The Doppler effect if you are talking about classical waves like sound.

-- Updated January 4th, 2014, 8:08 am to add the following --

Moving Finger wrote:"The speed of light is constant. Speed is distance over time. So, if the speed of light is constant, and one element of that speed is time, then a minute is always the same for every beam of light. That is, there is an absolute or a correct time."

Suggest you read up about the Special Theory of Relativity.

"a minute is always the same for every beam of light" makes no sense.

For a beam of light, traveling at the speed of light, time in fact does not pass at all - in other words, if you could travel at the speed of light then for you there would be no elapsed time between the start and end of your journey - you would be the same age when you arrive at your destination as you were when you left your starting point. To a stationary observer your journey takes a finite amount of time - but to you (traveling at the speed of light) your trip would in effect be instantaneous.

It's counter-intuitive, which is why many people cannot accept it. But its true.

I think you missed the point of the equations, time is undefined for the photon, but I suppose if you really missed that point there is no point in explaining it.

"Time is not timeless, the question of time is moot at best since its passsage through time and space is undefined, accordingly."

Albert Einstein.

There is no absolute time even for light, anyone who says otherwise is an idiot frankly no offence. Absolute time died with Galileo and Newton, or it should of done. wiki/Absolute_time_and_space

Since for some bizarre reason despite scientists themselves defending wiki as no more or less accurate than any journal in Nature.

humans are wankers though.

Just look it up, **** da powlice, if ignorance is bliss then you must be really high right now.

In some of his later papers (especially in 1920 and 1924), Einstein gave a new definition of the aether by identifying it with "properties of space". Einstein also said that in general relativity the "aether" is not absolute anymore, as the gravitational field and therefore the structure of spacetime depends on the presence of matter. (It also must be said that Einstein's terminology (i.e. aether = properties of space) was not accepted by the scientific community.)[12]

1920: To deny the ether is ultimately to assume that empty space has no physical qualities whatever. The fundamental facts of mechanics do not harmonize with this view. For the mechanical behaviour of a corporeal system hovering freely in empty space depends not only on relative positions (distances) and relative velocities, but also on its state of rotation, which physically may be taken as a characteristic not appertaining to the system in itself. In order to be able to look upon the rotation of the system, at least formally, as something real, Newton objectivises space. Since he classes his absolute space together with real things, for him rotation relative to an absolute space is also something real. Newton might no less well have called his absolute space “Ether”; what is essential is merely that besides observable objects, another thing, which is not perceptible, must be looked upon as real, to enable acceleration or rotation to be looked upon as something real.[13]

1924: Because it was no longer possible to speak, in any absolute sense, of simultaneous states at different locations in the aether, the aether became, as it were, four dimensional, since there was no objective way of ordering its states by time alone. According to special relativity too, the aether was absolute, since its influence on inertia and the propogation of light was thought of as being itself independent of physical influence....The theory of relativity resolved this problem by establishing the behaviour of the electrically neutral point-mass by the law of the geodetic line, according to which inertial and gravitational effects are no longer considered as separate. In doing so, it attached characteristics to the aether which vary from point to point, determining the metric and the dynamic behaviour of material points, and determined, in their turn, by physical factors, namely the distribution of mass/energy. Thus the aether of general relativity differs from those of classical mechanics and special relativity in that it is not ‘absolute’ but determined, in its locally variable characteristics, by ponderable matter.[14]

AB1OB wrote:So you do not know which point on a circle is closest to the center?

Calrid wrote:There isn't one unless it is a perfect circle and that cannot exist. since pi is a transcendental number. I really think you should get to the point, there is no point on a circle where something will reach it first it's got "infinite" sides.

The point is it took me a half dozen posts to describe light as an expanding sphere because all the radial travel is equal (@ c). (And I doubt that, even now, you understand what I am talking about when I describe light as an expanding sphere.)

The radii of a circle are equal.

All 360 observers would see the light at the same time.

AB1OB wrote: (Nested quote removed.)



(Nested quote removed.)



The point is it took me a half dozen posts to describe light as an expanding sphere because all the radial travel is equal (@ c). (And I doubt that, even now, you understand what I am talking about when I describe light as an expanding sphere.)

The radii of a circle are equal.

All 360 observers would see the light at the same time.

yeah since I said that already I somehow doubt you were paying attention earlier.


Remember when I said only time and space can exceed c and that is philosophical at best?

See hyperinflation.

And no they wont because pi is transcendental and there is no absolute time in any frame of reference, it seems you have defined yourself into a paradox.

I'd give up this thought experiment it is not working.

No matter how small the circle is it will never be perfect at any scale up to the limit of infinity and that is the point.

Gulnara wrote:The more we know, the more we know that we don't know anything.

Not exactly. The more we develop an understanding about something, the deeper the underlying details become.

Xris wrote:If ... light does not experience time how can light be said to travel?

Good point. Travel is not a good word for light. A quantum unit of light has to be both here and there at the same time.