Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time
Posted: September 3rd, 2018, 6:48 pm
Steve3007 wrote: ↑September 3rd, 2018, 1:05 amI often find, in conversations like this, that it's difficult to keep up.Yep - it's a time-consuming business, and particularly when there's a lot to read through. I'm going to have to stop for tonight after replying to this one.
Halc said this:The use of that term has never registered with me before. I came into this subject by independently working out key parts of LET and only then reading up on relativity afterwards. There's a lot that I haven't read, so there are many more gaps of this kind in my knowledge of terminology that will turn up if you press for them. I have only gathered what's needed to explore the models and test their validity.Events are separated by a frame-independent interval for instance. That value should be the same regardless of frame in which the measurement is considered.David replied with this:You'll need to expand on that, because it doesn't appear to fit with relativity at all (any version). The measured time between events varies widely for different frames.Halc didn't say measured time. He said interval.
More generally, your recent comments seem to me to confirm the difference in general worldview that I mentioned in an earlier post. You appear to believe it useful to consider an entirely observer-independent "reality" that renders some observations objectively "wrong" and some objectively "right", as opposed to believing that accurately performed observations are simply observations. Reality is the aggregate of all possible observations of it.Reality must be doing something that we are observing, and it cannot be doing incompatible things. Take for example mode 2 of the simulation which represents Einstein's original SR. You run the simulation for a certain length of time and various events happen. If you freeze the action and change frame, you can see some events unhappening. The underlying reality cannot be doing that - once things have happened, they've happened. Something has to govern the unfolding of events, and there are several ways of doing that, three of which are explored through the modes of the simulation. Either you have events run with all clocks running at full speed or you have to slow some down, accepting the superiority of the time of whichever frame has its stationary-within-that-frame clocks run fastest. Simulations and the real universe cannot be running all frames as the fastest ones (meaning that their stationary clocks run fastest) and running all others slower at the same time.
The contradictions you claim to exist in Relativity seem to stem mainly from your using this worldview in your choice of language.The contradictions are made plain by mode 2 of the simulation. Run it until the time counter says 360, for example, and then change frame between A and B. You can see events happening, unhappening, rehappening, unhappening again, every time you change between those frames. The underlying universe is making no such change. The simulation has to recalculate what has happened at the chosen time by running some things forwards and others backwards, and the universe would have to do the same thing if it ran on that model of SR.
You're completely missing the point. If you're standing at point A, every frame of reference exists at that location at that instant, and all of those frames generate claims about what is happening at that moment at point B. It doesn't matter that what's happening at B can't be observed at that moment from point A. An event is scheduled to be happening at point B at a certain time, but different frames produce different times for it by the clock at point A. (The event, incidentally, can be confirmed to have happened on schedule later, so we can take it for granted that it happened at point B when it was supposed to happen at point B.) What we are left with is an infinite collection of claims about the clock A time at which this event happened at point B, and those claims contradict each other. The event at point B could be a pulse of light arriving from point A and a return pulse being sent back to point A. This means that the claims about the time of the "bounce" by clock A could be anything from the moment after the light left point A and the time the return pulse arrived back at point A, so we have a long stretch of time in which each moment is asserted to be the moment of the bounce by some frames. They can't all be right. Most of them are wrong. By accepting them all as right, you have spread out the event at point B across a long stretch of time throughout which it has both happened and not happened, not just at point A, but at point B too. To sustain this contradiction in your head as a viable idea, you have had to vandalise your ability to think - you have ceased to be rational. Go to my simulation, put it in mode 2, set it to 550 and then click on the "+" or "-" button and hold down the Return key to repeat the action. Look at the changes that take place as you change frame at a single moment of time. These frames are making contradictory claims about the current state of the unfolding of events in the universe and they cannot all be true at the same time.You're standing at point A and you know that an event will happen at a certain time at point B. One frame of reference tells you it must have happened by now, but another frame tells you that it hasn't happened yet. If both frames are equally valid, then both are equally true: the event has already happened AND hasn't happened yet. That is a very stark contradiction, and if you can't see that it's a contradiction, you're beyond help.An observer stationary in one frame of reference can observe events happening in a different order to an observer stationary in another frame of reference if the interval between those two events is such that one event cannot possibly have a causal connection to the other. Neither of those observers is objectively right or wrong about some supposed objective truth as to which event happened first. They have both made accurate observations. If you disagree, then you have to do so by describing a possible observation - a measurement or experiment - that demonstrates one or both of those observers to be wrong. If there is no possible causal connection between the events then you cannot do so. There is no possible observation which will give an objective, single answer as to which event happened first.
Obviously every acceleration is a deceleration. You will have learnt that in high school physics. A ball thrown into the air and in free fall is accelerating in a coordinate system in which the positive direction points towards the Earth (down). Therefore it is decelerating in a coordinate system in which the positive direction points away from the Earth (up).You're focusing on the wrong part of that - every deceleration involves a clock running faster and every acceleration involves a clock slowing down. You may be capable of imagining an acceleration to be a deceleration at the same time, even though it can't really be, but can you really go so far as to tolerate the idea that the clock's ticking is slowing down and speeding up at the same time? Maybe you can, but someone has done some severe messing with your mind to get you into that state.
A clock can be observed, by an observer who is moving relative to it, to be running slower than he observes a clock relative to which he is stationary to be running. While the opposite can be true for an observer moving with the first clock. Again if you think this is wrong, then tell me an experiment that an observer can do to demonstrate that. Don't just talk in terms of observer-irrelevant metaphysics.You're trying to ban legitimate analysis and restrict things to fooled observers who can't see what a magician's doing behind a screen. The important point behind all of this is that the universe has to be doing something and it is either allowing a clock to tick more often or to tick less often - it cannot be doing both at once. If you aren't prepared to think down this fully legitimate path, you have shackled your ability to explore reality, and you've done that by applying bogus rules from really poor philosophers. It is not only the universe that must be doing one thing or the other, but simulations too. When we try to simulate SR, we can't have it both speed up and slow down the ticking of the same clock at the same time - it's a complete impossibility. You have been taken in by a mind virus which is blocking your ability to see reality, and it all comes from nothing more than the authority of a stream of people who have made the same error before you and passed it on down to you as a piece of holy dogma that isn't grounded in reason. You have no logical justification for your position whatsoever. What is the magician doing behind the screen? Is he slowing down and speeding up the same clock at the same time (SR), or is he doing one or the other alone (LET)? Observations do not rule out the latter, but reason rules out the former because contradictions should not be tolerated, so which theory should be treated as superior in this situation?
If they really did share the same maths and make the same predictions then the differences between them would be entirely metaphysical. If it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it is, for all meaningful purposes, a duck.If the differences are metaphysical, on what basis does anyone have the right to tie the idea that there's no absolute frame to the theory? That would be rendered a metaphysical claim which should be outlawed from physics. But we're dealing here with contrary people who are determined to have their cake and eat it, tolerating contradictions and applying different rules to different claims in an arbitrary manner in order to back an irrational theory (which only produces broken models) over a rational one (which produces a functional model).