Farsight

Don't ask for it to be split off, swansont. The definition of c is at the heart of this whole thread. Yes, it's constant, but defining it as the "speed of light" is circular and has to be wrong. Your velocity as a fraction of c defines the very distance and time you use to calculate the speed that you then define c to be. edit: If I misinterpreted you and you don't define c to be the speed of light, what do you define it to be?

Robonewt: thanks for going through the essay and for your input. I'd like to respond properly but I'm at work at the moment, so I'll have to get back to you later. For now, I'd say I'm not trying to banish time from the science books. Time travel yes. But not time. Time exists, like heat exists. Both are derived from motion, and neither have any real direction.

Yeah right, so they were in different frames and suddenly they're in the same frame? Did their clocks jump? Did they skip time? What if they merely touched and then carried on? Get real. There's no mistake in my logic. The continued, ongoing, mistake in your logic is that you cannot see your own axiom, yet continue to use it as a "proof". Don't tell me about the definition of time. Look in TIME EXPLAINED and you'll see the definition of a second. Don't tell me I'm wrong because that is not the definition of time. Don't then try to use it as proof of the mistake in my logic. Are you being deliberately obtuse? Are you deliberately ignoring the bouncing clocks and parallel mirrors in my explanation above? The motion between two events at the same location can be measured by the zigzag light path leaving and returning to the event location. Or the zigzag light path of photons bouncing around the atoms of an observer or an object. No. My explanation was clear. You're saying something I didn't say, then saying it's wrong. It's a reprise of your "absolute time" straw man argument. LOL. After everything I've said about now? I don't believe it. Did you read what you just said? What about somebody who is .00000003 light seconds away? What about your own hand? You gloss over my careful logical explanations, and instead make leaping claims about your own axiomatic "proof". I take time and trouble to deal patiently with every point you raise, and you just brush it under the carpet. Then you come up with some new straw man to try to discredit me and what I'm saying. All because you will stoop to any means to defend your unshakeable unfounded faith in something you don't even understand. That's not honest, and it's not science. And I've been wasting my time talking to you.

Don't call it a theory. Explain your idea and ask for input. And ask yourself some searching questions as to why you're "obsessed" with it. But please do all that on a new thread, because it's counter to TIME EXPLAINED and this thread, where I say events mark the time, not the other way around.

I'm very cynical about stuff like astrology and new-age spirituality. But I voted "Yes". Because there's my packet of cigarettes on the desk in front of me, and I'm going to make them move with the power of my mind. Do I say ohmmmmm... ohmmmm... and kinda stare real hard sweating and grunting? No. I just pick them up and shove them in my pocket. Simple. OK I can't move them without using my arm, but so what. I can't move my arm without moving my arm either. It's still mind over matter.

Swansont: if you're three light seconds away from me you aren't in my past, and I'm not three seconds in your past. The only time for both of us is now. The delay time is an inconvenience, not a temporal shift. Your instantaneous velocity can be in any direction, not dimension. Snail: sure thing about the photons and the eyes. The delay time of our nerves and brain further adds to that sense of "everything we experience is in the past". But basically what I'm saying is that there is no spacetime. We can talk about it, we can calculate with it, but what's really there is space. Which means the past no longer exists. It's where things were, not a place we can visit. The world isn't a block universe, depicted as a cube, it's the equivalent of a square plate with things moving in it. Ed: I didn't say time doesn't exist. It exists like heat exists. What I'm saying is that it isn't fundamental. It isn't what you think it is. Yes, crossing the room takes time, but it's travelling through space, at a velocity, not travelling through time. And the velocity that dictates time experience can't be quantified by time experience, it's just some ratio of c. All: I hope my previous post is of use.

No Ed. The clocks have different reference frames, and your inference of "absolute time" from "absolute now" is wrong. OK, I've read the rest of your post. I'm going to skip the black holes for now. Let me try to explain things another way, and let's revisit the outstandings later. The colliding clocks have different reference frames because of their different velocities. They record the collision as an event happening "now" at time t1 and time t2 in their respective reference frames. The observer flying past has some other other reference frame, and would calculate that the collision happened "now" at time t3 in his reference frame. They're all experiencing time at different rates, they don't agree on the time of the collision, so you can't say the collision occured at any time t. You can't talk reliably about any time at which the event occurred. So there's no absolute time that you can use. But you know that the collision event occured and you can mark an intersection on your "worldline" chart. OK you can create issues by saying your observer flew past at some great distance and velocity, but it's not material. He's just another line on your chart, and his clock reading is as academic as it was for the colliding clocks. I recommend you simplify the situation by saying your observer just missed the collision by a hair's breadth. If you then contrive some other event happening at a different t1, t2, and t3, you still can't talk reliably about any absolute time at which this second event occurred, nor can you assign any absolute time between the events. When you try to do this, you put yourself in the position of the observer, and the time you calculate is based upon your observation that light travels a metre in the time it takes light to travel a metre. You'd be assigning time based upon the motion of objects compared to the motion of light. Rather than trying to assign an amount of time between events, it's purer to assign an amount of motion between events, taking the motion of light as your baseline. Imagine your clocks collided the first time, then bounced away and were deflected back to collide again. Also imagine that both clocks contain an internal metronome that is optical in nature, where the light bounces back and forth between parallel mirrors. Regardless of the velocities and reference frames of the clocks, the inter-event metronomic light path is the same length in each clocks. Light moved the same distance for both clocks, and it moved through space. The clock with the greater velocity moved through more space than the other. It didn't move through less time than the other. What you consider to be time is just your measure of the relative motion through space compared to the motion of light through space. It isn't an amount of time that separates the events, its an amount of motion. This is through space, not through time, and not through spacetime. You might say "aha, the events are separated by a distance and there's my time dimension" but you'd realise you were wrong when I told you both events occurred at the same location in space. You might say "aha the events are separated by 2 light-seconds" but you'd be wrong again because you're defining a second as the distance light moves in a second. The bottom line is that your "time dimension" is based upon amounts of motion, and you can't move through motion. There's no absolute time, but there is an absolute now, for all of us. If I'm here now and you're there 2 parsecs away, I can work out that your now is 6.52 years later than what I see through my telescope. I can calculate what your calendar shows now. If I'm moving towards you at a high velocity my years are compressed, but I can allow for that, and I can still calculate your calendar date now as 6.52 years later than what I just saw through my telescope. My motion affects my time experience, but it doesn't change my now. And it doesn't change your now, or the now that is absolute for all of us wherever we are.

I have freedom of movement in space, but not in time. I'm here in space on this side of the room. You're there in space on that side of the room. I have freedom of movement to go there. One two three metres, hello swansont. With time I'm here now, and you're there now too. You might think you're sometime else because your clock says 19:45:00pm whilst mine says 19:45:03pm. But you're not. You aren't living three seconds in my past. You can't see my future. You can't tell me what's going to happen. You've simply experienced three seconds less time than me because a portion of your internal motion |||| has been redirected into travelling motion /\/\/\/\. Time is a subjective experience. It isn't fundamental. It isn't really there, it isn't a Dimension, it's just a dimension, a measure, of our internal motion against other motion. Sorry Ed, the wife wants me to share a glass of vino, so I'll respond to your post later or tomorrow.

Transdecimal: Energy is related to stress, which is force per unit area, and is the same as pressure. But it's not enough to think of pressure alone, you need to multiply by volume to get energy. This yields a dimensionality of: (force / (distance x distance)) x (distance x distance x distance) Cancel out the distances and you get force x distance, which you recognise as work, which has the same dimensionality as energy. In a four dimensional world, energy is still pressure x volume, but now the volume has an extra distance dimension. Distance is denoted by s, so the energy equates to: E=Mc2s In a two dimensional world energy is still pressure x volume, but now the volume has one distance less. So energy is force, equating to: E=Mc2/s But if we look again at pressure, in a four dimensional world maybe it's force per unit volume. That would shove us back to E=Mc2 In a two dimensional world maybe pressure is force per unit length, which would again shove us back to: E=Mc2 Hmmmnnn. Actually, I don't know. And I'm not even clear what a mass is in two or four dimensions. I think I'd better bow out and leave it to Severian. Sorry.

You're still not getting it Ed. I'll try again: you're travelling fast, and you say your "now" is 10:15am. I'm not, and my clock says 10:30am. But when we collide we hit each other at the same time, Now, whatever your clock says. There is no absolute time. Whoever you are, wherever you are, the time is always, absolutely, now. It doesn't matter what your clock says, the time is now. No it doesn't. You're putting words into my mouth and building your whole rocket fuel case to prove something I didn't say. Try putting a collision between A and B into your example and you'll see what I mean. Don't accuse me of ignoring something. You've made a mistake with your opening premise, so the rest of the rocketship "proof" is irrelevant. Your logic doesn't fall at the first hurdle. It doesn't even get out of the starting gate. Because you assume something that you then use to prove what you've assumed. FFS, look at it Ed: Now is a Time. An absolute Now means... You're making assumptions about black holes too, and declaring a paradox that proves your case and disproves mine. Don't. Do some research on this. Look up Cygnus X. Ed: you pay inadequate attention to what I say, then paraphrase it into a totally different meaning upon which you build some lofty proof. Look at: "one can only conclude that Time is a Real dimension on par with Space". You've totally fogotten about you have no freedom of movement? Stop kidding yourself. It's NOT on a par with space. Here we go again. It was MINKOWSKI. Ed, this is incredible. Are you blind? I can MOVE through space. Back and forward, any way I want. I can't do this with time. Thus do I dispute you. On the grounds that we cannot move freely in it. And that rationale has DEFINITELY NOT been shown to be false. Ed, your posts are too long. Learn to focus in on one point, and stick to that point and the words used rather than the language of your misconception. And look up Flatlanders.

Edtharan: No. Their measure of time is different, as is their measure of that distance. They won't agree, so I'm going to skip your rocket fuel illustration. Yes they disagree over the time taken, and the distance travelled. But you've slipped from "absolute now" to "absolute time". There is no absolute time. That's what relativity is all about. Think of a situation where you've got two guys in rocketships a million miles apart in space. They synchronise clocks and agree that the time is now. Then they set off towards one another. One toodles along, one goes real fast, so that when they collide one guy's clock says 12:09 and the other guy's clock says 12:10. They don't agree on how far they travelled or on how much time elapsed, but they agree that when they collide the time was now. That's the absolute now. Time doesn't mark out events. Events mark out time. Your time dilation becomes infinite at an event horizon, Ed. This means all collapsing stars are still collapsing, and will still be collapsing in a trillion years time. But parking this, you do have freedom to move in the vertical direction. The problem is that all directions lead to the singularity. As I've said, time is a dimension in that it is a measure. But if you have no freedom of movement it's a very different sort of dimension to those of space, where you do have freedom of movement. There's been some historic linguistic/mathematical slippage where the two different meanings of "dimension" have become confused. No Ed. Your velocity V with respect to C modifies your time experience and your estimation of distance according to the equation I quoted. That's Special relativity. So if you see a different D and a different T at a different V, where's the sense in insisting that C is defined as D/T? You need to define velocity with its own units, like we do with temperature. The Minkowski maths works Ed. Nobody's disputing that. But performing calculations using a mathematical model employing time as a negative fourth spatial dimension doesn't prove it really is one. Squares have lengths and areas, but square roots aren't real. You won't find a pi anytime soon. And the blindingly obvious fact is that you cannot move from now. That fourth dimension isn't the same as the others. You can't move back and forth along it, and you can't not move along it. It's derived, not real. You'll have to wait until GRAVITY EXPLAINED for that Ed. I'll be starting on it soon. The glimpse I've had is shocking, so I need to work it through properly.

arkain: I don't quite understand that, and have to say that while I can empathise with some of what you say, I can't agree with all of it. I've come to the conclusion that space (rather than spacetime) is real, because time is an experience derived from motion through space. In effect you need motion to have time, not the other way around, and horror of horrors this yields an aether once you remove the "veil" we call time. It's because Lorentzian length contraction in the direction of motion gives you a problem with a rotating sphere. Anyhow, I'd say colour is a perception because the underlying ontological thing that's there is a wavelength, but I wouldn't say that about space or time, so do choose your words carefully.

Doublepost deleted.

It certainly does.

Edtharan: I'm tied up now. I'll get back to you later.

No, Paranoia. It's like a wave down at the beach. It has no mass of its own. But it's got enough momentum to knock you flat on your back. Maybe you will after you read this: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=23744

Thanks guys. Special thanks Spyman, I'll check them out. Ragib, the problem is this: Yes, in their frame WHAM the collapse is done. But right now in what we call 2006, they haven't even got to the W of WHAM. And they never, ever, will. This means something has got to give. We either kick out the singularity because it's never going to happen. Or we kick out time. Personally I prefer to kick out time.

There's something I'm puzzling about regarding black holes: I think it's reasonable to assume that black holes exist. But we know from GPS and other evidence that clocks run slower here on earth than they do up in space. It's not an optical illusion or some kind of observer effect, it's something real, and it's down to gravity. This means time "runs slower" as you near an event horizon, whereupon it stops. Which suggests to me that collapsing stars are collapsing so slowly as far as our time experience is concerned, that they haven't finished collapsing yet. This means there can't be any actual singularities, because as far as we're concerned, the collapse takes an infinite length of time. And if Hawking Radiation is true, the black hole will evaporate before the collapse is complete. Can anybody clear this up for me?

I wouldn't trust it anyhow. You get people who totally lose themselves in their subject and can no longer see the wood for the trees. I'd read the essay and point out errors or talk about the subject, not chuck in sly little digs without even having read it. For you: my credentials are that I'm a millionaire, a company secretary, and have 15 years Banking and Finance experience. My only "qualification" is an Accounting subsidiary course at university, and that doesn't count. I'm an IT Manager by trade, and have spent a lot of time doing "systems analysis and development" where the task is to translate muddled English into precise computer language. But like I said, my credentials don't count, I don't count, what counts is the essay and whether it's right and/or interesting. That's science, and why we're all here. Aren't we?

OK guys, what do you think? I'm not sure I'm quite happy with it myself. I'm not sure why, maybe it needs more work. So if you could point out any errors or suggest improvements I'd be grateful.

Energy is generally misunderstood. Our schoolroom textbooks tell us that energy is the capacity to do work, and work is the transfer of energy. They go round in circles without getting to the heart of it, and some children grow into adults with no clear concept of what energy is. Let’s start by saying that energy is the property of a thing. It is not a thing in its own right. To illustrate this, I can talk about a red bus, or a red red ruby. All these things have the property that we call red. A thing can be red, but you cannot remove this red and hold it in your hand. You can remove the paint or the dye and hold that in the palm of your hand, but you are still holding a thing that is red. You cannot remove the red from the dye to hold the red in the palm of your hand. Even when you imagine red, the image in your mind’s eye is a thing. You always need a thing to be red. There is no such thing as “raw red”. In similar vein there is no such thing as “raw energy”. Another illustration is money. You can spend money just like you can expend energy. But the money doesn’t disappear, just as the energy doesn’t disappear. Somebody else now has your money, just as some other thing now has your energy. Think about an old house, nestled in the countryside. It’s picturesque, worth a lot of money, and it’s built out of cob. Way back when, some guy put some energy into shifting earth and straw to make the walls of this house. He did the same thing with the wood, which grew out of the earth because the trees put energy into shifting water and CO2. The guy made money out of that house. What they were paid for was the energy he put into it, through the work he did moving stuff. That’s why money and energy are similar. They get things moving, they get work done. One makes the world go round, and the other one makes the world go round too. But money isn’t what energy is, and nor is motion. You need mass and motion before you can talk about energy. Consider a 10 kilogram cannonball, in space, travelling at 1000 metres per second. Not that you can see it. We talk about how much kinetic energy this cannonball has. We talk about KE = ½ MV2 and we do the maths and get five million Joules. But what has the cannonball really got? Its mass seems real enough, I hefted it into my spaceship this morning before I took off. And its motion seems real enough too, because one false move and it’ll be smashing through my viewscreen taking my head off. To find out more I take a spacewalk to place a thousand sheets of cardboard in the path of my cannonball. Each sheet of cardboard exerts a small braking force, slowing the cannonball to an eventual halt. This takes two seconds. We know that the cannonball will punch through more cardboard in the first second than in the second second, because it’s slowing down. So we deduce that a cannonball travelling at 1000m/s has more than twice the kinetic energy of one travelling at 500m/s. We can do the arithmetic for each second, then slice the seconds up finer and finer, and we end up realising that the ½V2 is the integral of all the velocities between V and 0. But what we don’t realise is that kinetic energy is a way of describing the stopping distance for a given force applied to a given mass moving at a given velocity. You can flip it around to think about force times distance to get something moving. Or you can think in terms of damage. But basically that cannonball has “got” kinetic energy like it has “got” stopping distance. It’s similar with momentum. That’s a different way of looking at the mass and the motion, based on force and time instead of distance or damage. We look back to our cannonball and cardboard, and we know by definition that in the first second the same amount of time elapsed as in the second second. So we realise that a cannonball travelling at 1000m/s has twice the momentum of one travelling at 500m/s. But what we don’t realise is that momentum is a way of describing the stopping time for a given force applied to a given mass moving at a given velocity. A cannonball has “got” momentum like it has “got” stopping time. But wait a minute. I didn’t fire the cannonball at 1000 metres a second. I dropped it off at a handy spot out near a GPS satellite, then zipped off in my spaceship in a big loop. It’s me doing 1000m/s, not the cannonball. The cannonball is just sitting there in space. It hasn’t got any kinetic energy at all. I’ve got it. But I don’t feel supercharged with five million Joules of energy coursing though my veins. So where is it? Where’s the kinetic energy gone? It isn’t anywhere really, because all that cannonball has got, is its mass, and its motion. And that motion is relative to me. Kinetic energy is not a thing. It’s just a relative property. There are other forms of energy. There’s the potential energy of mass and gravity, potential energy in springs, there’s electrical energy related to current and voltage, there’s chemical energy related to electron bonds, nuclear energy, all sorts. They all deserve more explanation than I can give in this short essay. So I have to take a shortcut: how do you make something move? Easy. Hit it with something else that moves. And how did you make that something else move? Where did it all start? I pitch you a cannonball, you whack it with a baseball bat, and it tumbles away at one metre per second. You made that cannonball move. Now, where did the energy come from to make it move? From your muscles: “The release of ADP and inorganic phosphate causes the myosin head to turn, causing a ratchet movement. Myosin is now bound to actin in the strong binding state. This will pull the Z-bands towards each other. It also shortens the sarcomere...” It gets complicated, and I want to make it simple. Maybe too simple. Sorry. But basically some plant somewhere caught the momentum of a sunbeam and stored that kinetic energy by making starch. Think of starch as a chemical spring. You eat the spring. You release it in your muscles, and boing and whack, you shift that cannonball. The kinetic energy of the cannonball came from a sunbeam that came from the sun. And the sun gets its energy from nuclear fusion. Squeeze a couple of hydrogen atoms together and you make helium. But when you do, ping, something breaks, and things spring out between your fingers, things like photons. 4 1H + 2 e --> 4He + 2 neutrinos + 6 photons What is a photon? Particle physics comes with mental baggage that says it’s a speck, a point, a particle. But it’s more like the slink in a slinky spring. Only the slinky spring here is all of space, with its permittivity and permeability. A photon is a like a ripple on an electromagnetic oceanic “field” between the stars. A boat on the ocean can ride the ripple and the ripple passes on by. But tie that boat to the sea bed with a rubber rope, and you can capture the energy of the ripple, and save it in starch, or coal, or oil. You can use it to build your house, and whack that cannonball. It all started at the beginning of the universe. Visualize yourself in a dark cylindrical room. The walls are banded and helical. You feel a tremble, and you realise with horror that the room is the biggest baddest spring you’ve ever seen. It’s the “prime mover”, and it is exerting an incredible pressure, but is bound by thick steel cables called “symmetry”. The cables are under impossible tension, and you can hear ping ping ping as individual cable wires snap. Symmetry is about to break, and you know your prime mover will disintegrate into a fireball of nuclear and electromagnetic springs that will go bouncing out to fill the night and make the world what it is. It’s all analogy of course. Analogies are based on the things we experience, and these are not the things of the subatomic world. So analogies can be dangerous, like too much butter. But it’s enough to give you a grasp of what energy is. Enough to tell you that energy is to do with tension, which is negative pressure, which is the same as stress. Stress is force per unit area, and energy is force times distance, so energy is pressure times volume. So here’s the beginnings of a new definition: Energy is the capacity to do work, and is also a volume of negative tension… You know you can’t hold tension in the palm of your hand, and a volume of it doesn’t help. That’s why you can’t hold energy in the palm of your hand. There is no such thing as “pure energy”, just as there is no such thing as “pure pressure”. Things aren’t made out of energy. Things have energy. And how much they have, is relative to how much other things have. Yes, I know mass and motion doesn’t sound like volume and pressure. But to explain more, I’ll have to explain other things. Things like time and space, and mass and gravity. Later.

Yes, I reiterate that there is an absolute now. But it's not a reference frame. A reference frame is something you've introduced, and it relies on your current concept of time as a length. You're looking at your clock and saying its 5:08pm and thinking your now is different to my now because my clock says 5:09pm. But we collide now for both of us, it's the same now, the absolute now. That's the reality of it. I've said repeatedly that time is a dimension in that it is a measure. But we have no freedom of movement in time like we do in space. Therefore it is not a Dimension like those of space. Time is not a length. You can't travel through it. That's reality too. The formula you're looking for is probably [math] sqrt{(1-v^2/c^2)} [/math], but this moderates time experience, and it is late. Re analogies, have you looked up ontology yet? Your posts are so long that it's easy to miss points. I don't do it deliberately. Tell me the post where you proved whatever you thought you proved about temperature and dimensions, and I'll get back to you tomorrow.

Snail: energy is a property of a thing not a thing. As regards colour, take a look at the TIME EXPLAINED essay and show the "colour perception experiment" to somebody who is not colourblind. Note that the as-yet-unseen ENERGY EXPLAINED essay goes on to say that the property we call "red" is not a true property of the subatomic world, because colour is our perception of the underlying true property, which is wavelength.

Aw, here we go. Either thread. LOL. There is only one thread. And lookie here, ad-hominem attacks like I'm not sure if you have the capacity to explain either Energy and Money to anyone. OK ecoli. Let's talk about hypocrisy, dishonesty, and intellectual arrogance. Yours.

All: Oh yes it is, as is "cleverly avoiding an answer". I'm not going to respond to somebody who accuses me of ad-hominem personal attacks whilst turning a blind eye to those inflicted on me, and meanwhile delivers his own subtle little ad homs like "you attack people" or "you have no credentials" or "you avoid answers and are evasive". Now if this is a misunderstanding on my part I'll apologise. Otherwise I'm not getting into it. There's far too much of this nonsense on forums like this.