| Subject: The 27th book ... "is something I
feel more in my heart than in my head." Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 16:19:42 +0300 From: Dimi Chakalov <dimi@chakalov.net> To: Paul Davies <pdavies@els.mq.edu.au>, <deepthought@asu.edu> Cc: Paul Davis <P.Davis@damtp.cam.ac.uk> Davies comes down on the side of some sort of undefined "life principle" in the cosmos, but he says that this "is something I feel more in my heart than in my head." SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, August 2007, p. 100 -- Hi Paul, If you wish, you may now use your head, http://www.god-does-not-play-dice.net/Trautman.html#pedestrians Take care, Dimi ========== Subject: The mysterious flow of time: How about the human
brain?
Dear Professor Davies, In the forthcoming printed issue of New Scientist, 6 December 2003, Sec. Letters, http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opletters.jsp?id=ns24249 you wrote: "Peter Lynds's reasonable and widely accepted assertion that the flow of time is an illusion (25 October, p 33) does not imply that time itself is an illusion. It is perfectly meaningful to state that two events may be separated by a certain duration, while denying that time mysteriously flows from one event to the other. Crick compares our perception of time to that of space. Quite right. Space does not flow either, but it's still "there". Paul Davies
I'm afraid you are wrong, and will suggest a simple experiment with your brain to verify my claim. You could be right if, and only if, you don't have a brain. Consider this. There are two events separated by a certain duration, this email of December 4th and the forthcoming printed version of New Scientist of December 6th. If you were right, we all would be living in a frozen 3-D space, right now, along with St. Augustine, http://members.aon.at/chakalov/white_paper.html However, the people who *already* printed the issue of New Scientist of December 6th knew that there will be a future instant of time on December 6th. Also, you and all your colleagues will be able to read again this email on December 6th, http://members.aon.at/chakalov/Davies.html Here's the experiment to verify my claim: two days from now, on December 6th, click on the link above to read again this email. (It will be included in my CD ROM, too.) I believe you all will recall that you've received it on December 4th. Can you and your colleagues remember the issue and recall it on December 6th? If you can, then all your statements above, and your article "The mysterious flow of time" (Scientific American, September 2002) have missed a very important physical system, right above your neck, http://members.aon.at/chakalov/white_paper.html#brain Your brain does indeed read the flow of time, the transition from one event to the nearest event in the interval December 4th - December 6th. Your self -- the thing you mean when you say "me, Paul Davies" -- does not change. NB: What is the reference frame in which your brain and hence your self does NOT change, Professor Davies? Briefly, your brain defies your speculations about the nature of time. Unless you're some ghost and don't need a brain, which is highly unlikely. Of course, you may say that you're a physicist and are not interested in your brain, but let me stress that your clock, mine, and those of all readers of this email, both online and on my forthcoming CD ROM, read the cosmological time precisely like your brain, http://members.aon.at/chakalov/Schwarz.html See also the "rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy" below. Again, you could be right if, and only if, you don't have a brain. If you can read this, your do have a brain, and are wrong. I invite you and your colleagues to check out the mystery of 3-D space as well, http://members.aon.at/chakalov/Zeh.html#note Please try to prove that there is indeed 3-D space in GR. If the good old 3-D space were not flowing, there would be no such thing as 3-D space. This issue is from November 1917, so please don't hesitate to elucidate it. It's about time. Yours sincerely, Dimi Chakalov
http://members.aon.at/chakalov/faq.html Pritie amzanig huh?
On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 17:17:21 +0300, Dimi Chakalov wrote:
===
Note: Paul Davies has written many interesting books, some of which bear highly provocative titles. My favorite is "About Time. Einstein's Unfinished Revolution" (Penguin Books: London, 1995). You can find many quotations from Albert Einstein on this CD ROM, and I'll leave it for you to decide who is really concerned about his unfinished revolution in QM and GR, Paul Davies or the author of these lines. Needless to say, Paul Davies has never replied to my email regarding his book. He is rich and famous, and probably drinks Budweiser. Now, let me offer you a deal: you will follow all links in my email to Paul Davies above, and all links in this short note, and I'll try to be more specific. In present-day physics textbooks, you will find many shocking statements about the static frozen nature of spacetime: "There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes", as Bob Geroch put it. The whole universe is being laid out like a song waiting to be played with your MP3 player, and the instant 'now' from the cosmological time arrow firmly goes in one direction only, following the accelerated expansion of spacetime driven by some utterly mysterious stuff called dark energy. This is certainly not new to Paul Davies, but he is deliberately vague about the cosmological time arrow. In fact, in his celebrated article "The mysterious flow of time" (Scientific American, September 2002), which was mentioned in my email above, there are no such words as 'cosmology' or 'cosmological time'. It is not a trivial task to link the thermodynamic time arrow to the cosmological time arrow, there is a huge pushing force in the latter, coming from the so-called dark energy, and Paul Davies prefers to keep quiet. Another issue which is left unexplained is the notion of 'orientation of a compass needle' used to illustrate the asymmetry of time: a compass needle pointing north does not indicate that the compass itself is traveling north. Fine, but a compass needle is pointing north because of some physical field interacting with the needle. What physical field could possibly be involved with the accelerated expansion of the universe which creates the cosmological time arrow? Dead silence. Read some excerpts from this article below; it is available at Paul Davies' web site. But what is the meaning of 'time arrow'? It implies some irreversible process, hence you may talk about an arrow per se. If we are to construct a time arrow, it must involve an irreversible creation of brand new things at each and every instant 'now', to make sure that this time arrow cannot go backwards. Its past states do not exist anymore, they all are irreversibly destroyed. Its future states do not exist either, since they are to be created in the future. Do you realize the new terminology here? It is not like going up on a ladder, with all steps 'out there', being laid out for you. It is about two different kinds of reality, one existing in the instant 'now' (called 'local mode of spacetime'), and another one, potential reality, placed in the postulated global mode of spacetime, as explained in the front web page. Do we need this new kind of reality? Yes we do. We cannot have the reality of the instant 'now' without it. These two kinds of reality are interdependent, as stressed many centuries ago by St. Augustine.
Please bear in mind that we are facing a very specific kind of paradoxes, similar to the ultraviolet catastrophe. There is no imminent threat in the first paradox of Zeno or in Thompson's lamp paradox, for example. They only say that motion is impossible. People know that it is indeed possible, and don't care. The paradoxical situation here is that we can't explain how come we are still alive and well. There are tons of nasty things that can easily happen, and therefore should have happened in the past 13.7 billion years: naked singularities, closed time curves, etc. Read a very clear, down-to-earth paper by Carlos Barcelo and Matt Visser, "Twilight for the energy conditions?" So, what is the paradox of continuum? In order to have the luxury of a "point" -- and that is what Einstein's GR is all about -- there must exist simultaneously two distinguishable adjacent points. You can't have one point only. It's a package of three points taken en bloc: a point can exist iff there are two neighboring points as well. All three exist simultaneously. If you produce one point, you get instantaneously its two neighbors; all three en bloc. Also, there must exist something that can move the state of a physical system from one point to the next one, along a continual trajectory. Hence we ask a very simple question: what could possibly wrap these three points and allow something to pass from one point to the nearest one? This is the mysterious 'flow of time' and the phenomenon of transience. Read more from Abner Shimony, he has written a beautiful paper, "Implications of Transience for Spacetime Structure"; please see the reference here. The answer is also simple: look at your brain, it does all this easily. The human brain has a special potential state, which does not change. This is the brain's Holon, and its mental correlate/reflection is the human self. Surely if something can carry the states of a physical system along a continual line of points, then the carrier itself must not change. That's what the human brain does. How? By its unique self-acting ability. All we have to do is to model the universe as a huge brain, which is what PHI is all about. Again, you can't apply double standards for time and space: once you lose time, you lose space as well. If you believe that Einstein's GR is a complete theory, you may be surprised to find out that Albert Einstein has always hold the opposite opinion. He knew very well that his theory is incomplete. Please search this web site for quotations from Einstein, get the context in which they have been used, and make up your mind as to who cares about his unfinished revolution. More in 2005, celebrating Einstein's
Annus Mirabilis. Dimi Chakalov ---
p. 34: "The most logical conclusion is that both past and future are fixed. For this reason, physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety -- a timescape, analogous to the landscape -- with all past and future events located there together. It is a notion sometimes referred to as block time. Completely absent from this description of nature is anything that singles out a privileged special moment as the present or any process that would systematically turn future events into present, then past, events. In short, the time of the physicist doesn’t pass or flow." p. 35: "By convention, the arrow of time points toward the future. This does not imply, however, that the arrow is moving toward the future, any more than a compass needle pointing north indicates that the compass is traveling north. Both arrows symbolize an asymmetry, not a movement. The arrow of time denotes an asymmetry of the world in time, not an asymmetry or flux of time. The labels "past" and "future" may legitimately be applied to temporal directions, just as "up" and "down" may be applied to spatial directions, but talk of the past or the future is meaningless as referring to the up or the down." p. 36: "After all, we do not really observe the passage of time. What we actually observe is that later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember. The fact that we remember the past, rather than the future, is an observation not of the passage of time but of the asymmetry of time. Nothing other than a conscious observer registers the flow of time." p. 37: "There are two aspects to time asymmetry that might create the false impression that time is flowing. The first is the thermodynamic distinction between past and future. As physicists have realized over the past few decades, the concept of entropy is closely related to the information content of a system. For this reason, the formation of memory is a unidirectional process -- new memories add information and raise the entropy of the brain. We might perceive this unidirectionality as the flow of time. "A second possibility is that our perception of the flow of time is linked in some way to quantum mechanics. It was appreciated from the earliest days of the formulation of quantum mechanics that time enters into the theory in a unique manner, quite unlike space. The special role of time is one reason it is proving so difficult to merge quantum mechanics with general relativity. (...) But when a human observer makes a measurement, one and only one result is obtained; for example, the rebounding electron will be found moving in a certain direction. In the act of measurement, a single, specific reality gets projected out from a vast array of possibilities. Within the observer’s mind, the possible makes a transition to the actual, the open future to the fixed past -- which is precisely what we mean by the flux of time. "There is no agreement among physicists
on how this transition from many potential realities into a single actuality
takes place."
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