question is: are we sticking with Einstein?

When I was a little kid, I mean really little - like 7-8 years old, I was walking down the street with my parents, and at a certain point I saw one man walking some 40-50 meters in front of us. In that moment I've had like an inspiration, you know one of those short and fugacious moments when every piece of the big puzzle seems to be in its place in our heads.
So I turned towards my father and said "you know dad, I think that the man in front of us is actually existing in another time." My dad was pretty surprised to hear that and has asked me to explain better my thoughts. So I did and it actually made sense. for sure in my head it made a perfect sense - that man was a part of another time (that's how me kid called with simple words the ethereal dimensions surrounding him) with respect to us.

The sad fact is - I can't recall those thoughts anymore. I've tried to think it over recently, I've tried with a beer, with a wine, no way. That short moment of intuition has gone lost (forever? I'll keep trying).
Nowadays, being a grown-up person, I don't think too much about these physical problems - I've moved on to metaphysics. I you want a theory about what we and the surrounding world actually are and what shall we become after we leave this physical world, just blow a whistle. Perhaps I might found a new religion - looks like it pays well (see the scientology, for example).

Ok, now back to that beer - perhaps I come up with something new...

Cheers!

 

Time is something physics has struggled with for a long "time"

one of the best explanations I heard was its an artificial construct designed to help define the movement of an object from point a to point b. It takes "time" for the motion to occur.

But Godel showed that time becomes less relevant in multiple systems of movement. So if time is artificial, something that we created in order to describe motion, and if certain systems of motion seem to defy this artificial view of time's hold over the properties of motion, then isn't it more reasonable to redefine our concept of time than to try and deny an observable motion. Say in a neutrino? If the experiment is proven accurate in its results and given what some other researchers are finding about the speed limit of light then it might just be "time" to take a more open minded look at some of the more well constructed alternative theories. Which brings us back again to the issues of the educational process.

Kinda comes full circle no mater how you slice it.

cheers
B

 

Err I wouldnt mention this to anyone if I were you or it might be misunderstood and you will be on a bus back to Cosovo or Bulgaria

 

!!!!!!! Any way--time was invented so you are not late. Dogs dont have time, they live in a kind of now. Thats why they get up in the middle of the night and go to sleep in the afternoon, they cant tell the time or even know what a clock is.

In the dark at night I can hear the clock ticking --I cant see it but it is ticking away along with my life -then I cant get to sleep worrying about it.

 

This relates well to my little story above. It's all about intuition, imho.

I believe that the issue of time and space are taught in a wrong way. Math can help and science needs it to arrive to the numbers, but it is imho inadequate when it comes to the comprehension of the real nature of time, space and forces. Just a sterile tool, I'm affraid.
I think that intuition should be encouraged more in the educational process when it comes to relativistic and quantum physics.

A kid imho has better chances to really comprehend the real nature of time and space than an old guy with a rigidly modeled mindset.
To use a boatbuilding analogy - kids' mind is like a fresh flowing epoxy resin. It conforms easily into the most unbelievable mold shapes. The more a person grows up and gets older, the more his mindset cures and becomes a pretty rigid shape. It can flex somewhat to conform to new surroundings, but reminds essentially just a cured and finished object.

All this is to say that, as odd as it might sound, the quantum physics thematics imho should be taught to talented kids at the very beginning of their educational path - with very little or possibly no math at all. The math would be introduced later, after their minds have comprehended intuitively the real nature, or the essence, of the problem.

Cheers

 

They have invented digital clocks now. It might help you to sleep better.

 

Frosty, deep six the ticking clock and take some small comfort in the knowledge that you have plenty of company with those thoughts. We all know that we are not going to get out of this life alive.

Hmmm! This thread can easily morph into a psych study if we aren't careful. I'm as old as dirt and sure, I have contemplated my own mortality. I reckon that my own clock is ticking somewhere in the back ground. Was it Descartes, or some other famous person, who used his own heartbeat to time the pendulous swinging of a church light fixture??

 

As I said in a previous comment, it was the Lorentz transformation, an equation that tells you, basically, how how fast something is going in one reference frame if it was measured in another reference frame. According to Newton, it was a simple equation: v1=v2+v3. In the Lorentz transformation, it is a complex formula involving the square root of c^2-v^2. This number becomes imaginary when v^2>c^2. Actually, that's just the mathematical reason. As Einstein showed in the the theory of relativity, there are also various physical dimensions that approach limits as v^2->c^2.

The reason physicists moved to the Lorentz tranformation in the first place has to do with the fact that they wanted a single equation that handled both particles and light. The Newton equation doesn't work for light.

The ion drive is not the warp drive. The idea behind the warp drives is that it somehow "warps" space, making the distance between two points shorter to get around Relativity. The ion drive is just a special kind of reaction drive, no different in principle from a rocket.

 

Galileo Galilei, Pisa cathedral, 1602.

 

But Omar Khayyam didn't understand relativity. Or probably television or bicycles, if it comes to that.

Time is a dimension, like length, breadth and width, in a four dimensional system it's necessary to measure it (I'm not sure about string theory or M Theory but probably time is one of those little coils there too). So far, no scientist has been able to disprove its existence, though I suppose if you get into metaphysics, philosophy holistics, acupuncture, or poetry and anything non-empirical then you can dispense with it! But if you want to design aircraft, electronics, be an astronomer, physicist or anything actually useful - you can't.

 

I think Tom is saying that we do not (yet) have the ability to move within time the way we do in the three physical dimensions.

 

Perhaps that is why Omar was able to see the escense of the matter so clearly. No complicated obscuring thoughts in the way of basic reason and logic. Several others seem to agree with me, at least in part. I think you may also, judging from your above statements. As I said in my first post, everything ages (changes) and entropy lives. Everything that exists changes from instant to instant and we need something to define or measure the change and invented time to do that. We could not do very much of what we do without the concept of time. As an electronics design engineer, I used it daily and still do when designing boats. Time does not exist just as a meter length does not exist. Both are just measures that represent something real and neither is real itself.

 

The idea that time is just another dimension like length, breadth, and width is a mathematico-romantic fiction. The fiction is based in part on a confusion over the word "dimension" and in part over some abstract physical theories.

First, anything that you can measure can be a dimension: temperature, voltage, depth, acceleration --anything. Time is a dimension in this sense.

The other meaning of dimension is related to this, but is specific to geometry: a line has one dimension, a plane has two, and space has three. And there are some abstract geometrical theories that deal with "spaces" that have more than three dimensions. Time is not a dimension in this sense.

Now, there are certain theories that are expressed in terms of 4-dimensional vectors, where one of the dimensions in the vector is time and other three are spacial dimensions. People tend to conflate this with the idea of 4-dimensional spaces but they aren't the same thing. A vector can have any set of dimensions you want. You could create a vector with height, width, breadth, and voltage if you wanted. That would not make voltage a spatial dimension.

Now, it is very interesting that the mathematics with these space+time vectors works out so well, but that's no reason to go all poetic and try to find deep philosophical truth in mathematical notations. It's just a notation.

What far is more important than notation is the important ways that time is different from space. The three spatial dimensions are chosen by convention with respect to a coordinate system. In other words, there is no length until you decide which direction length is. You can always rotate your coordinate system to turn length into breadth or width. Or you can turn it so that three entirely new directions give the three dimensions. Or you can use a polar or spherical coordinate system which doesn't have three orthogonal dimensions at all.

Time is not a matter of convention in this sense and does not rotate with the spatial dimensions, unlike the fourth dimension in a four-dimensional space.

 

I think that youthful experience qualifies as an 'epiphany'. In the context of the thread subject matter, and relating to your metaphysics interest, the following saying from the muslim mystic Rumi may be apposite......

“The great scholars of the age split hairs in all the sciences. They have gained total knowledge and complete mastery of things that have nothing to do with them. But that which is important and closer to him than anything else, namely his own self, this your great scholar does not know”.

 

It would appear that many of you are not aware of the way your own brain works.Im not saying that in any derogetory sense, (my spelling checker is buggered so Im doing my best)

Monks and the like would often go into trance like state or mdediation after fasting. During fasting or starving yourself the brain is denyed the vitamins to think correctly, unfortunately it does not let you know that so you think that you think ok.

Ive done it many times --reached the point of so called enlightenment from fasting (starving myself) it was something I used to do for dietery reasons. All things become clear and everything is simple and understandable,--its not but you think it is.

Could this be then the reason ancient monks became scholors of yet unkown subjects and write in a wonderfull way mistifyng the nutritioned.

A childs brain developes in 6 month intervals , something a qualified teacher fully understands and usually the reason why a child will be better at winter exams than summer and not because in summer he stares out of the window.

Notice you go through states of dreaming, say a month of unusual dreams and then none at all. No its not because someone walked across a grave or you going to win the lottery, Its a normal thing usually running with periods of good or bad sleeping for no reason.

If people could understand there deficiencies and or the ability of the brain or its inabilities there would not be crap posts like this one.

The first thing you should think when your thinking is am I thinking correctly and am I in a good condition enough to think,---hic.

So before you start to believe that the man across the street is not of this dimension, consider if the oysters you just ate were OK.

I wopuld like to say that people that think there is a super being /god/ what ever should hand there brain back in becaue its definately failed completey, ide like to say that but I wont.