Philosophy Discussion Forums

11 years ago, I was excited when I read about Einstein. But I had questions. Now, I feel after reading about his ideas, I still have many questions to ask.

Firstly, Einstein treats time as one dimension, while space has three dimensions. But he said that time and space are similar. But if they are similar, why is it that one has three dimensions while the other has only one dimension. This is the first question where I question his idea.

Secondly, is his opposition of the quantumn mechanics. The experimental observation of the very large is very different to the experimental observation of the very small. Is this strange? Einstein opposed quantumn mechanics while he supports his idea, yet, experimental observation of the very small did carry out. Yet, Einstein did not come up with a theory to describe the things of the very small. This is another question.

Thirdly, light must have a mass if it exists, this is why light can bend when it moves near a planet. The reason why light bends is because the external force influences light. If the external force can influence light, then, light must have a mass. If light has a mass, then, force equal mass times acceleration will apply to light.

So if light has a mass, light must change its speed as it hits an object. If the speed of light changes, then, Einstein's idea is no longer relevant, where there must be another new entity to record how the speed of light changes. And this new entity that records how the speed of light changes is time, the universal absolute time been constant.

And it is also this universal absolute constant time that records how individual time can flow backward to the past, or to any other direction. This is why both the absolute time and relative time can exist together.

So to me, absolute time depends on relative time and relative time depends on absolute time. If absolute time exists, then, relative time must exist. If there is relative time, then, there is absolute time. It is impossible to have relative time without an absolute time. It is impossible to have an absolute time without relative time.

And there are many relative times, such as the time in Tokyo, the time of New York, the time of India, the time of UK, the time in Mars, so and so on: All of these are relative times. While absolute time is an entity that records all the relative times.

Regarding to the questions that Einstein did not answer, such as his failure to describe the experimental observation of the very small, I will say that because the experimental observation of the very large is very different to the observation of the very small, then, different universes must have different laws to describe why the observation of the very large is different to the very small.

If you feel there are different laws, then, the differences in observation of the very large and the very small will no longer contradict one another.

Finally, time must have more than one dimension, if time is the same as space, otherwise time is no longer similar to space if one has one dimension while the other has three dimension. To me, both time and space have infinite numbers of dimensions, which I had said before.

So after reading my words, if you have any word to add, please go ahead.

Firstly, Einstein treats time as one dimension, while space has three dimensions. But he said that time and space are similar. But if they are similar, why is it that one has three dimensions while the other has only one dimension. This is the first question where I question his idea.

Although General Relativity finds it convenient to preserve the 3 classic spatial dimensions and add Time as a 4th, this can mislead one to think GR implies that Time is somehow different or special from space. But in GR, space-time is simply 4-dimensional with Time having no "special" property other than it being another dimension from the other 3. In some respects it is helpful to conceptualize Time as a "spatial" dimension (See post #28 in the thread "Time: A spatial dimension"), making it easier to appreciate how the passage of time is merely human's perception of the 4th dimension.

Secondly, is his opposition of the quantumn mechanics. The experimental observation of the very large is very different to the experimental observation of the very small. Is this strange? Einstein opposed quantumn mechanics while he supports his idea, yet, experimental observation of the very small did carry out. Yet, Einstein did not come up with a theory to describe the things of the very small. This is another question.

Einstein's opposition to QM was due merely to his commitment to classical physics (General Relativity is a classical theory with no regard for Planck's constant, thereby allowing complete determinism in principle). The uncertainty principle did not fit his conception of how physics should operate, nor could he abandon his conviction that "spooky action at a distance" was impossible. It is unfortunate Einstein did not live to see the empirical proofs of Bell's Inequality. I have read several science books that argue how Einstein would likely have conceded the reality of QM once he saw its evidence for quantum entanglement.

Thirdly, light must have a mass if it exists, this is why light can bend when it moves near a planet. The reason why light bends is because the external force influences light. If the external force can influence light, then, light must have a mass. If light has a mass, then, force equal mass times acceleration will apply to light.

Special and General Relativity were not created to explain the nature of light; they were created to explain the nature of Space and Time so as to accommodate the behavior of light. GR does not speculate on the ontology of light itself, nor does it have to. In GR, light does NOT bend because external force influences light. Rather, light bends because light naturally follows the geometry of space-time, and space-time bends in the presence of mass. So light per se need not have mass.

Thank you. Thank you for responding.

A Poster He or I said: “Einstein's opposition to QM was due merely to his commitment to classical physics (General Relativity is a classical theory with no regard for Planck's constant, thereby allowing complete determinism in principle). The uncertainty principle did not fit his conception of how physics should operate, nor could he abandon his conviction that "spooky action at a distance" was impossible.”

Then he is trying to judge science. He is saying what he thinks science should be rather than saying what science is and his thinking contradicts with his words, where he said: “"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

To me, Einstein had stubborn and conservative attitude, where if he liked one idea, then, he would reject all other ideas that are different to the idea he liked. His conservative attitude is that the 4 dimensions were not invented by him at all, where his teacher talked about the 4 dimensions, and he just wrote what his teacher wrote without adding more words or without maybe even questioning. And when a priest talked about the big bang, he opposed it in the start, because he was attached to the idea of static universe, and it took him a long time for him to give up his attachment to the idea of a static cosmos. So as his love of music; he was attached to Mozart or Beethoven that he did not want to listen to ‘rock and roll’ or any other music. Towards the end of his life, because of his dislike of quantum mechanics, he stopped reading the words of quantum scientists. So, Einstein did have stubborn and conservative attitude in his life.

A Poster He or I also said: “So light per se need not have mass.”

Anything that is able to exist must have a mass. Even time has a mass if time exists. Because what is existence? You can use numbers to express what you cannot see if they exist. So for instance, how many thoughts you have? The more thoughts you have, the larger the size and the larger the size, the more mass there are. So even thoughts, time and light all must have a mass, because whatever it is, if there is something, it must be quantitative.

A Poster He or I also said: “Although General Relativity finds it convenient to preserve the 3 classic spatial dimensions and add Time as a 4th, this can mislead one to think GR implies that Time is somehow different or special from space. But in GR, space-time is simply 4-dimensional with Time having no "special" property other than it being another dimension from the other 3. In some respects it is helpful to conceptualize Time as a "spatial" dimension (See post #28 in the thread "Time: A spatial dimension"), making it easier to appreciate how the passage of time is merely human's perception of the 4th dimension.”

To me, time and space are different, yet, they are also the same. This may sound strange to you, because how can two things be different if they are the same? But let’s say energy and mass. If energy is not the same as mass, but we can both use numbers to express energy and mass! Now, if both energy and mass have the same quantitative units, then, they are the same even though they are different. What I am saying is this: if mass and force are different, yet, we can use numbers to express how much force is there and how much mass is there, where both of the two different entities can have the same quantitative amounts. Do you understand?

Just like apples and oranges; apple is different to orange. But both apples and oranges can have the same quantitative amounts. So even though apple is not the same as orange, but I can say that three apples are the same as three oranges quantitatively, but not qualitatively.

Qualitatively, three oranges are different to three apples, but quantitatively, three oranges are the same as three apples; so as time and space. Qualitatively, space and time are different, but quantitatively, space and time are the same, both having infinite numbers of dimensions. So even though they are different qualitatively, but they are the same quantitatively.

But why is it that space and time are different qualitatively? Well, if space and time are the same qualitatively, why is it that we need to use another word to say ‘time?’ as different to space. If space and time are the same qualitatively, then, we can just use one word ‘space,’ why will we need to use another word ‘time,’ is they are the same? So space and time must be different, otherwise we will be using one word only, where the other word ‘time’ is no longer necessary, where we are using all the time.

Then he is trying to judge science. He is saying what he thinks science should be rather than saying what science is and his thinking contradicts with his words, where he said: “"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

There's no contradiction. Einstein's intuition simply told him that by failing to produce a mathematical formalism that could yield deterministic outcomes (instead of probabilities), QM was simply "incomplete" as a theory; he never said it was incorrect. He thought it more likely that "hidden variables" were at work rather than God "playing dice" with the universe.

But that his assumption, where he assumed that if things exist, then, they need to be deterministic.

But if things exist, maybe it can be deterministic or maybe it can be probabilistic or maybe even both.

Einstein did not prove that if things exist, then, they must be deterministic.

So it was more like a unjustified faith that he is advocating, where scholars say: "Some of his words are like holy scripture."

Stanley Huang wrote:
But why is it that space and time are different qualitatively? Well, if space and time are the same qualitatively, why is it that we need to use another word to say ‘time?’ as different to space. If space and time are the same qualitatively, then, we can just use one word ‘space,’ why will we need to use another word ‘time,’ is they are the same? So space and time must be different, otherwise we will be using one word only, where the other word ‘time’ is no longer necessary, where we are using all the time.

You mean, why don't we call time and space round fruits? It is a bit far fetched, because space can not be without time, and time can not be without space, while apples and oranges do fine without each other. Space and time are like conjoined twins, they are different persons but can not exist without each other, because parts of the systems that sustain them are shared.

I suppose you could charge Einstein with assuming the universe worked deterministically, but science involves a lot more assumptions than we let on. This one probably would have been a fairly safe assumption for Einstein to make, since everything in the observable universe up to that point behaved deterministically, including his own theory of GR, which he saw verified by experiments during his own life time (such as the gravitational lensing of light around the mass of the moon). So all of a sudden quantum theory busts on the scene and doesn’t jive with anything we frequently associate with the macro observable world, but describes things on the atomic level very well. Einstein didn’t what to let quantum theory throw a monkey wrench into what was begining to look like a purely deterministic explanation of the behavior of the universe, famously saying “God doesn’t play dice.” His efforts to formulate a ‘grand unified theory’ show he wasn’t opposed to trying to combine different theories, but they were all deterministic, and the inclusion of quantum would ruin everything. Quantum theory wasnt as firmly esstablished then as it is now, in no small part einstiens GR failing in the atomic world helped to validify QT.

Stanley Huang wrote:
Regarding to the questions that Einstein did not answer, such as his failure to describe the experimental observation of the very small, I will say that because the experimental observation of the very large is very different to the observation of the very small, then, different universes must have different laws to describe why the observation of the very large is different to the very small.

If you feel there are different laws, then, the differences in observation of the very large and the very small will no longer contradict one another.

There aren't different laws for big and small.

An atom, for example, is a miniature solar system.

A Poster He or I wrote:It is unfortunate Einstein did not live to see the empirical proofs of Bell's Inequality. I have read several science books that argue how Einstein would likely have conceded the reality of QM once he saw its evidence for quantum entanglement.

Barring some very unlikely "loopholes", what do you think are the implications of violations of Bell's inequality?

Granth wrote: There aren't different laws for big and small.

An atom, for example, is a miniature solar system.

The laws of the universe are of course the same everywhere, but the laws that govern big and small have not yet been reconciled. Until physicists manage to come up with a unified field theory (which Einstein worked on for many years without result), then the very small realm of quantum interactions and the macroscopic realm, in which General Relativity can be applied, must be dealt with separately.

I would be wary of considering an atom a miniature solar system, too. Electrons don't have well-defined positions and velocities in the way that planets do.

Barring some very unlikely "loopholes", what do you think are the implications of violations of Bell's inequality?

In a nutshell, the violation of Bell's inequality implies that space-time is not the fundamental thing our experience and best scientific theories would have us believe.

A Poster He or I wrote:In a nutshell, the violation of Bell's inequality implies that space-time is not the fundamental thing our experience and best scientific theories would have us believe.

Okay, but which of the following, do you think that violations of Bell's inequality imply?

1. Nature is Non-local.

2. There are no pre-existing properties (non-realism)

3. Something else (e.g. superdeterminism, etc.)?

Bohm2 wrote: (Nested quote removed.)

Okay, but which of the following, do you think that violations of Bell's inequality imply?

1. Nature is Non-local.

2. There are no pre-existing properties (non-realism)

3. Something else (e.g. superdeterminism, etc.)?

I don't think that by choosing option 1 that nature itself is necessarily non-local. But rather just one very small part of nature is non-local - ie that of entangled particles. In this way Einstien's claim that no information - or at least no useful information - can be transmiited faster than light does not be abandoned.

A_Seagull wrote:I don't think that by choosing option 1 that nature itself is necessarily non-local. But rather just one very small part of nature is non-local - ie that of entangled particles. In this way Einstien's claim that no information - or at least no useful information - can be transmiited faster than light does not be abandoned.

There are physicists who do think that violation of Bell's implies nature is non-local and at some deeper level there is a conflict between QM and relativity. This includes physicists like Gisin, Norsen and Bell himself. I started a thread on the topic in link below and Norsen in his papers and on the thread discusses why Bell felt that his theorem does tell us something about nature:

Since all the crucial aspects of Bell’s formulation of locality are thus meaningful only relative to some candidate theory, it is perhaps puzzling how Bell thought we could say anything about the locally causal character of Nature. Wouldn’t the locality condition only allow us to assess the local character of candidate theories? How then did Bell think we could end up saying something interesting about Nature?...That is precisely the beauty of Bell’s theorem, which shows that no theory respecting the locality condition (no matter what other properties it may or may not have – e.g., hidden variables or only the non-hidden sort, deterministic or stochastic, particles or fields or both or neither, etc.) can agree with the empirically-verified QM predictions for certain types of experiment. That is (and leaving aside the various experimental loopholes), no locally causal theory in Bell’s sense can agree with experiment, can be empirically viable, can be true. Which means the true theory (whatever it might be) necessarily violates Bell’s locality condition. Nature is not locally causal.

What do violations of Bell's inequalities tell us about nature?
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=670856

Okay, but which of the following, do you think that violations of Bell's inequality imply?

1. Nature is Non-local.

2. There are no pre-existing properties (non-realism)

3. Something else (e.g. superdeterminism, etc.)?

Definitely number 1.

Number 2, no. Non-locality is consistent with hidden-variable physics, should such hypotheses turn out to be valid someday. In that case, pre-existing properties could come from, say, Bohm's Implicate Order, for example. However, I'm a non-realist philosophically speaking, so I don't actually consider there to be a need for deterministic agency behind our experience of the universe.

As to number 3, I think non-locality itself implies a further physics to the universe. My non-scientific intuition favors holistic metaphors where space-time (separability in general) is an emergent epiphenomenon of reality's dynamism.