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It's About Time - Defending A Victim of Factoids

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In one day, I was forced to elaborate upon the numerous factoids that have infected the ignorant populous (in the most innocent use of the word) concerning the nature of space and time.  First and foremost, it would be inappropriate for me to even separate the two, for one cannot exist without the other.  It seems like such a fundamental idea when viewed by a physics major such as myself, alas the vocabulary associated with my field drives the casual passerby away from the purest form of its comprehension.  Such distaste for the sophisticated appearance of many physical theories, the lay have taken the habit of referencing more crude and overgeneralized sources that they gain these misinformations, leading to the spread of deception and falsehoods.  Their ignorance is exploited by swarms of prowling frauds who promise enlightenment and knowledge in a "simpler" and "more elegant" format, yet in the same breath they prove their own invalidity.

To start, we need to understand what physical theories are, what they describe, and how science is truly conducted.  A theory is an explanation of some phenomenon that has been verified through rigorous testing of its predictions.  Immediately obvious is the requirement for predictions, and not just any sort of predictions, but specific predictions, whether quantitative or qualitative (for reasons I won't delve into due to the philosophical density of information, quantitative values are preferred to prevent measurement bias and allow for a universally applicable system of acquiring knowledge).  Theories are not conjectures thrown around by chattering crackpots or suggestions spewed from the mouths of pondering minds; they are concepts founded on empirically justified arguments and extensive peer review.  There are some postulates that sometimes acquire the title of "theory" despite lacking that experimental background, but this is less due to the definition of the word, and more due to the stupidity of popular media.  Another exception falls under those that have faced extensive mathematical proofs, and though a weaker form of theory in the scientific community, they are theories nonetheless (especially those that faced massive amounts of peer review).  For the layman, this may seem fine and dandy until they here the term "elegant" uttered by scientist after scientist.  What does "elegance" have to do with anything?

Unfortunately, those outside of physics tend to view "elegant" in the word's most formal definition:  to be fundamentally simple yet fruitful.  This is how we use it as well, to an extent, but the meaning of simplicity is far more complex in the science community than in everyday life.  You may find "simple" translates to easy, but you'd only be partially correct.  "2 times 2" is a math problem anyone can figure out, right?  So, how can something like String Theory, or even General Relativity be elegant when the mathematics involved,at times, goes beyond that of a physics undergraduate's education?  First of all, it really isn't a fair argument when you think about it.  Remember how long it took you to get your multiplication tables?  Then fractions?  And then those pesky decimals?  Years just to do those "simple" tasks.  "But I was only 5," you say?  The reason it was so hard when you're that young is not just because you have an immature psyche, but because you had never been exposed to such material.  Take playing a sport even.  Such a simple task as throwing a football or goalkeeping quickly reveal their difficulty when you join a competitive club, but when we're planted on our couches watching the game, it seems so easy (even watching Patrick Roy do those splits across the hockey crease).  Science is pretty much the same.

Our desire for "elegance" arises from philosophical origins rooted in what is called "Occam's Razor."  You might be thinking, "Yeah!  And it says the simplest one is the right one!"  Again, that would be half-right.  Occam's Razor dictates that, when faced with a plethora of possible solutions, the one with the least ad hoc postulates is most probably the correct choice.  An ad hoc postulate in science is any addition that is attached to the theory an inconsistency in a specific situation is resolved.  Hence, the less Band-Aids it has, the more likely it is to be true.  THIS DOES NOT MEAN THE HIGHER THE MATHEMATICS, THE LESS LIKELY IT IS TO BE TRUE.  What Occam's Razor seeks to do is not simplify for the ease of mind, but simplify for the ease of logic, so that the premises lead up to the conclusions in the most efficient and rational manner.  A theory containing numerous ad hoc postulates would branch into these countless exceptions, while the one absent of such would contain all the scenarios within its domain.  Ad hoc postulates don't necessarily make it completely wrong, but tell you that the theory is incomplete or complicates something that can be simplified further.  An example of such a theory is MOND, which stands for Modified Newtonian Dynamics.  Recently, it gained popularity as an alternative to dark matter, but after some successes, it found itself kneeling before Occam's Razor with its neck stretched out and primed to be cut.  The reason why was that to explain the dynamics of the Bullet Cluster, it required its own dark matter (hot neutrinos to be precise).  Ironically, the neutrinos it demanded were once a candidate for dark matter, hence the theory became redundant, contradicting the very purpose of its existence.  Is it wrong?  Not necessarily, because it does make accurate predictions in areas dark matter makes no effort to even mention, but at the same time, it contradicts obvservations in places the dark matter mold predicts near flawlessly.  So, what we then do is take aspects from MOND and see if they fit the more efficient dark matter models.

So the next time you run across a true theory, don't scoff at the term as if it depicted some half-hearted explanation a scientist pulled from his hind quarters.  See it for what it is:  a well-established and extremely accurate explanation that has withstood the ever mounting tests of time.  Does that mean you shouldn't hold it under a critical eye?  No.  But you should never relegate to "just" something.  As it was bluntly put to me when I was younger, "Those who view scientific theories as 'just theories' were dropped on their heads as a child, and are now experiencing the side-effects of 'just' another one of those 'theories.'  Ask Newton."

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A SHORT ANALOGY ON HOW TO VIEW SPACETIME
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With this new understanding of theories, we can move on to the real factoid I want to address:  time does not exist.

Every time (no pun intended) I run across this absurd statement I want to blow a gasket and throw someone off a rooftop so they appreciate time a little bit more.  It really is the victim of human ignorance and pride, or one could go as far as saying it is a consequence of humanism.  We really do hold ourselves responsible for things that could equally be due to more natural causes.  Take cancer for example.  Hot dogs cause cancer.  Cell phones cause cancer.  Everything causes cancer!  Though the former might actually have some truth behind it, the question of cell phones is one I can guarantee has no effects on your chances of getting cancer.  They quite simply do not have the energy to break chemical bonds or produce enough heat to cause damage of any sort.  In the worst case scenario, the heating of the phone itself creates the most physical stimulus in the human body, but it still lacks the punch to do anything more than make your cheek a wee bit warmer.  "But it'll cook my brain," you say!  To that, I say, "Hah!  If it only did for some people."  Despite my distaste for some people chewing on their cellphones for literally their entire waking moments on this planet, I can't tell you their brains are getting baked into a plump cake of brain tissue.  Cell phones operate on radiofrequency waves (RF waves), which are a non-ionizing, low-frequency class of electromagnetic radiation.  Don't let the word "radiation" scare you here.  Everything from visible light, to gamma rays, to infrared is a form of radiation.  The radiation you might be thinking of has to do with ionization and high energy EM waves that can do damage to cellular structures (e.g. ionizing EM radiation is responsible for this).  Actually, the National Cancer Institute even admits that there has yet to be any link to cancer via cellphone use, and even gives a concise list of most major studies with their findings, all but one or two stating that no relationship was found.  When it comes to cooking your brain, it takes 50 minutes on your smartphone to get significant changes, but the only effect is increased glucose metabolism in that hemisphere.  This metabolic increases has yielded no adverse health problems.

Yes, there are things that greatly increase your chances of cancer, but creating the excuse that cell phones are some harbinger of this horrible disease takes away from the fact that the main reason for cancer is that we outlive our reproductive age (we simply live longer than we should; so in a sense we are indeed responsible but for all the wrong reasons). I digress....  My point is that we are a really insecure species, and how we handle this is by putting ourselves in the center of everything we experience.  Its this insecurity that hinders us in so many ways, and leads us to come to the oddest conclusions.  We have this desire to be at the center of the universe, and it gets in the way of discovering the truth, especially when the curious are trying to understand something so alien to them as physics.  Because of this, things like time become victims of our ego, and Sophism quickly conceals the truth behind a veil of fallacies.  So, what about this time thing anyways?

Well, it started after having quite the conversation with a gentleman in my Calculus III lecture.  We spent our walk back to our dorms discussion various scientific misconceptions when out of my mouth stumbled the confusion over time.  Immediately he pounced on my statements stating that time was just a human construct, and off the debate went.  Of course, before we could make any progress, we reached our destination and went our own ways with the discussion still open.  It must not have been minutes later when I read a quote on a good friend of mine's page with some graffiti reading, "Time doesn't exist.  Clocks exist."  The quote itself has a more intimate, lifestyle interpretation (which has some problems of its own like circular argument), but this interpretation gains its legitimacy in assuming universal derivation.  What I mean by this is that its power originates from the illusion that it arises from the very nature of our universe.  See where this is going?  How can we legitimize something that is fundamentally wrong?

Why is it wrong?  Let's look at space and time to find out.  What are they?  Yeah, yeah, we know the whole "they're dimensions" thing, but what does that mean?  Honestly, if you ever find a complete answer to that, you deserve a Nobel Prize.  There is no scientific description as to the physical nature of dimensions, for two reasons specifically:  (1)it is a metaphysical subject that science does not dabble in and (2) their physical reality doesn't change anything about how our universe works.  For now, all you have to know is that dimensions are the values necessary to describe a point/event.  I can hear the raining boos already.  These two reasons will become apparent by the end of this presentation, I assure you.  To start, let's focus on space.  If space isn't real, how could we possibly exist!?  Don't worry, you wouldn't be the first to cry this, but it really comes down to interpretation (there's that word again).  Worst case scenario:  space is a purely human construction that originates from our perception, but is generalized through mathematics and instrumental measurement to remove the discrepancies between human perceptions.  In this case, our instruments are like correctional lenses allowing us to see a single, consistent universe that can be described from any hypothetical perception (hence some arbitrary reference frame).  So, space becomes the unit of size and depth in these arbitrary frames.  Hopefully you realize that this view of space removes its reality while retaining its relevance and consistency in describing our universe.

That is just fine and dandy, right?  But time, we don't need that... do we?  Newton might have told you no, but Einstein would beg to differ.  Einstein's big year when he published four groundbreaking papers included a very "special" (cue drum and symbol) theory we now call Special Relativity.  What SR (we abbreviate it for convenience) suggests is that no universal reference frame exists, and that we must instead look at the inertial reference frames.  An inertial reference frame can be simply put as a reference frame dealing with a moving entity, and the revolutionary idea Einstein gave us was that the faster you move, the more things changed.  They didn't just change either, but created seemingly paradoxical effects that would confuse any observer.  Even weirder, these effects have been experimentally recorded, and the foundations of Relativity have been validated beyond the shadow of a doubt.  So, what are these exotic things that occur?  The first is called "length contraction" or "Lorentz contraction" and refers to the spacial contraction of a distance as observed by the object in motion, relative to an observer.  In short, as one approaches the speed of light, the distance between you and your destination seems to dramatically contract, so you end up arriving in a much shorter amount of time.  In contrast, the observer would see what is known as time dilation, in which, instead of the shortening in the length you traveled, he sees that your time seems to "tick" slower.  More formally, the evolution of time around you appears to approach zero from the perspective of an outside observer, as you approach the speed of light.

At first you might be thinking that it makes a lot of sense, but you might notice something about these effects.  Time.  Time plays a crucial role in describing these events, but how could it do this if it didn't exist?  We could play it off and use our explanation of dimensions from before, yet we'd face quite the quandary.  If time were truly a human construct, why does space care so much that it contracts when we see an effect in time?  Why the heck does our universe care about time so much, when all it needs is space?  The truth is that one cannot exist without the other, and this relationship is what built the concept of spacetime and Einstein's fifth great paper, General Relativity.  In physics terms, the relationship between space and time is summed up in the Minkowski triangle, which provides one leg to space, and one leg to time, and the hypotenuse representing the maximum spacetime interval (objects traveling at the speed of light fall into this category).


www.quantonics.com/Quantonics%…

Right off the bat, we see an equality between the two, time equating to imaginary space and space to imaginary time.  Don't let the term "imaginary" fool you; imaginary and complex numbers have as real of an existence as "real" numbers, but they were just so odd upon their conception that early mathematicians didn't know what to make of them.  Minkowski spacetime is at the heart of General Relativity, and as probably the most successful classical theory to be conceived, it is here to stay.  GR utilizes the description by describing our cosmos as existing within the spacetime continuum like heavy stones on a rubber sheet.  These indentations made in the sheet are what we observe as gravity.  3-D images of how it works can be found here, and might help you visualize the subject better:  

i1.ytimg.com/vi/a7uTKwbsFtg/hq…
orbismediologicus.files.wordpr…
i1.ytimg.com/vi/O3-NglSJcJ4/hq…
www.ariebaris.com/homepage/upl…

The relationship becomes vital in describing how objects move through spacetime, especially in gravitational field, even predicting similar effects found in SR but strictly due to a gravity field.  Without GR, the Global Positioning System would be impossible, and so would many probe missions launched by NASA, among other things.  At this point, you are probably wondering where this is going, so I'll cut to the chase.  I would venture a guess that viewing a physical space continuum is not that difficult for you, but time is a different story.  How can we conceptualize something as abstract as time?

It's easier than you think.  Try to define a point in your vicinity (in a room, on the grass, etc.).  What do you need?  It's position in three dimensions (altitude, latitude, longitude), which isn't so bad, but where does time fit in.  To see how it fits into all this, imagine there was an object at that point, and that those coordinates defined that object's position.  Now move that object somewhere else (anywhere you want!).  Define that point.  Alright, seems simple enough, but time has yet to make an appearance... or has it?  Go over what you were asked to do again, and you'll see that time was already inferred in my directions.  The first point was rather simple to define, but the minute you moved that object you removed time from its hiding place, because if we didn't include time, those two points would be indiscernible.  Don't worry if that sounds confusing; here's a nice little exercise to help.

Imagine you're a famous photographer hoping to get some nice shots of the stars during the wee hours of the night.  You plant your camera, open the shutter, and press the button.  Low and behold, after letting it sit for an hour you return to find streaks of white streaking across the atmosphere.  Why did this happen?  Because you left the shutter open.  By leaving the shutter open you ignore the fact that a change in position occurred over a period of time, and view the image as if all the events happened without even considering time.  That's how time fits in!  Time is so engraved into our everyday life that we overlook its more powerful characteristic:  the separation of events.  Like a camera has a maximum shutter speed, so too does the universe, and we call it Planck time.  Planck time is no arbitrary unit of time, but one derived from universal constants and centered around the foundations of quantum mechanics.  Without time, reality would look more like this:

people.rit.edu/andpph/photofil…
billwadman.com/support//images…
billwadman.com/support//images…
cdn.instantshift.com/wp-conten…
ahopefulsign.com/wp-content/up…

Hopefully by now you truly appreciate the dimension of time, and if there is still an uneasiness about the consequences of a spacetime continuum purely of human creation, let me offer this.  Imagine spacetime as our camera of reality.  Space is our overpriced lens and time our unnecessarily precise shutter.  Every event can be captured, but to do so we have to adjust the lens and shutter to get the clearest picture.  This camera then gives us a complete image of what our universe is and how it acts, and we can describe it through the comprehensible information given through the camera.

Before we leave, let's get back to that quote, "Time doesn't exist.  Clocks exist."  The quote itself (in the most common interpretations that I've run across) aims to say that time is irrelevant, and you shouldn't let time define your life, because its how you live your life that counts.  Though it has some merit, it misses the point and may even kill itself in the long-run.  We can try to ignore time and push things off until we've completely run out of it, or we can acknowledge it, but instead of living our lives as its slave, we live it as if we had none to spare.  Because in the end, spacetime does not dictate the actions of its constituents, it records them. Whether you wasted 30 years of your life in the bar or just woke up for your first day of school, getting the best out of life means putting every ounce of your soul into your passions, your dreams, your peers, and everything you come into contact with.  It doesn't matter if you waited until your dying moments, because all it takes is a single act to fulfill your life beyond your wildest dreams.  Don't deny time; prove you're better than it.  Show time that you can do more than it could ever demand from you, and that you can endure any burden it could ever thrust upon you.  If you do that, you won't recall the time that passed you by; time will remember you.
Today was rather interesting, especially considering I went through two discussions and a clarification concerning the notion of time.  

The turning point was a post containing the quote, "Time doesn't exist.  Clocks exist."  Philosophically deep at first glance, it sounds like a fundamental rule of life derived from the very nature of reality, but in fact it validates itself upon a false premise.  Though, I am not sure if anyone provided a consistent interpretation for it, they mostly explained it as meaning:  right now, we are slaves to time and if we are to break from the illusion of time, we'd see that life is just about living.  Because of the inconsistent explanations, I took it from two aspects:  from the literal sense of the expression to the more vague, philosophical meaning.

After hearing so many factoids and misinformations concerning time, I thought it was about time someone clarified the subject thoroughly, or at least to an extent that could give "time" a fighting chance against the power of pop culture.  Please enjoy, and by the end of it, I hope you learn a thing or two about time, and just maybe, something about life.

Regards,
Cosmological Defense Attorney
© 2013 - 2024 SH9DOW
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Chezzy-Am's avatar
Interesting that day before yesterday, me and my friends had been talking about astronomy and the nature of the universe's expansion (i.e. light travels at a constant rate, but the distance which light must cover to reach the boundary of the universe is impossible due to the distance relative to the speed of light is increasing faster than light's ability to catch up to it - in retrospect, light if travelling on a single way track to its destination, is increasing until it reaches its fullest extent, but the distance it has to cover is increasing faster than light can cover).

From what I gather in this paper of yours, you are right about time's essential nature. I won't argue about Einstein's and Hawking's theses on Time and the Space-Time continuum, because it makes sense to me and I'm fine with it. However... however, as a layman, and particularly as someone who has a limited understanding of the universe, I'll just say that for me, time is not... completely definitive.

Basically, another way of saying "the quantum mechanics embodiment of Time, as indicated by Planck's constant and thenceforth the discussion of all the theories concerning time, I'll agree with - because I'm familiar with Planck and I read his profile - but for convenience sake, I'm fine with using seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years as a measure for daily use".

A good paper. Always a pleasure reading such educational works :) Keep at it.