Time doesn't exist. It is simply an abstraction to measure the comparative rates of the movement of matter.
All our measurements of time refer to the movement of matter: the rotation of the Earth, the orbit of Earth around the Sun, the swinging of a pendulum, the vibrations of a cesium atom.
Time travel is not possible. It would require the re-arrangements of atoms into exactly their former position, which is precluded by entropy. Too bad.
There is no past or future. There is only the forever "now".
From now on, I am going to adopt this definition, it just gives me a feeling of control for all practical purposes. Since time travel is not possible, I'll be using compensating transactions to rollback myself to a state, approximately similar to previously recorded measurements.
That's just an argument for time not being fundamental.
Special relativity gives us a perfectly workable view of time as a symmetry relation on this eternal now you speak of.
Thermodynamics, specifically the second law and especially in its kinetic theory, give us a nice view of time as a global statistics phenomenon of ensembles.
Even more, there are solutions to Einstein's equations, that seem to allow time travel.
All that said, you might be interested in the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation which takes a stab at quantum gravity and makes no mention of time. That said, it's also a far cry from the 20th century physics eternal now you seem to be envisioning.
Crystallization of time seems like a misnomer to me. Aren't they continually adding laser energy to the system to maintain the "crystal" state? Doesn't crystallization imply a stable state resistant to external energy sources rather than dependent on them?
I tend to agree, but had a lot of trouble understanding the article (I studied different branch of physics). I think this is the key:
"The recipe was incredibly complex, but just three ingredients were essential: a force repeatedly disturbing the particles, a way to make the atoms interact with each other and an element of random disorder... More than that, the researchers found that even if they started to flip the system in an imperfect way, such as by slightly changing the frequency of the kicks, the oscillation remained the same."
First, imagine a halite crystal. In halite, ions of sodium+ and chloride- are stacked in an orderly fashion. If you orient the crystal correctly, you can put your mental finger on a sodium ion, and move it in the x dimension, and it will alternate NaClNaClNaCl-.... You can move your mental pointer in any of the spatial dimensions, and the state you encounter will alternate between the two component ions.
To turn the halite crystal into a (hypercubic) time crystal, you would need to move your mental pointer in the time dimension and see the ions alternate, just as they did in the spatial dimensions. You could potentially do this by causing those ions to spontaneously transmute into each other, in a cyclic fashion. Or you could oscillate the crystal at just the right orientation and speed. But both of those are currently beyond our technical capabilities.
In theory, if ionic attraction behaved similarly in the time dimension as in spatial dimensions, there will be a particular resonant frequency of oscillation that would indicate that the halite had gone from a cubic spatial crystal to a hypercubic spacetime crystal. But that oscillation speed is likely associated with a temperature that would destroy the spatial crystal by melting it. Too bad. You probably can't turn a halite crystal into a spacetime crystal. If you had one already, it might be metastable enough to not melt, but as they say, you can't get there from here.
But we can flip the spin of an electron. So instead of making an ionic crystal, you make an electron spin crystal in an existing molecular lattice structure. Then you pulse a laser at it to make all of the spins flip. In that situation, the crystal structure lines up to ensure that the spin-flips occur at a particular rate. If you stop kicking at it, it stops being a crystal, just like going past the physical boundary of an ionic crystal. If you add more sodium and chloride to halite, you can make the crystal grow in spatial dimensions. Adding more laser energy to a spin crystal causes it to grow in the temporal dimension.
And like adding the ions, you don't have to line them up exactly before letting them go. You just dump them, and the crystal orders itself. So those sort-of-random kicks give enough extra energy that the time crystal can keep growing in the time dimension. If you stop kicking, the crystal might have enough internal "conductiveness" of that spin-flip energy to keep flipping by itself for a while just from the previous kicks you gave it, or even the ones you haven't given it yet. But crystals have finite boundaries. Eventually, you get to the end of the crystal in the temporal dimension, and it stops flipping. But we have no idea how long you will have to watch it before it stops, since we don't know exactly how time crystals work.
I am not a physicist, but I'm seeing a similarity between time crystals and the vacuum, as the vacuum results in quantum fluctuation - which is also a form of activity at zero-point energy. This point of view means that the vacuum could be contrived to be a time crystal. I'm clearly drawing an incorrect conclusion, but why?
Any of you saw the movie "Arrival"?
Without spoiling anything, it drops an amazing concept, which is also exploited in the novel in a much subtler way, and it's bugging me ever since.
In the movie, the "alien" are not perceiving time like us, they experience it in a circular way, they also write in a circular way. There is no beginning and no end to what they write, it just happen. The main character, after having studied them for a long time, start to think like them, and she start to experience time like them. So she merely exist in the present, past and future, she just exist.
You can take what you want, but for me it's like we maybe simply exist, at any given time, we can remember or/and live our past but also our future. We just exist, at any given moment of OUR time; You can BE at anytime between your birth and death. We're maybe just stuck in our current concept of time, like we maybe don't perceive other dimensions because they are "hidden" to our way of experiencing our world.
For a non-physicist who's wondered why string theory imagines 10 dimensions--which seems like a totally arbitrary number--the short video above gives a nice visual explanation of why it should be 10 dimensions and not some other number.
The problem I have with this video, is that while I find it amazing, someone could create a video about 15, 20 or 5 dimensions, and it would still make sens in my mind, with the right explanations.
Sounds like Philip K Dick's take on time. IIRC he had a mental breakdown at one point, and believed this is exactly how time works. That at any moment, you could be walking down the same street in 2000 AD, 4000AD, and 0 AD, and the same stories would be or could be unfolding
Not from what I know. PK Dick towards the end of his life believed himself to be living both in 1974 and as an early Christian named Thomas in the Levant sometime in the first century CE contemporaneously.
Even if all that were true, it seems moot because our memories are encoded in our brain. If you could suddenly transport to 10 years ago, you'd be reverting to the state of your brain at that time so you wouldn't remember doing so anyways. Ditto remembering the future -- your memories come from your brain, which is subject to time causality.
Dualism offers a solution: your soul could have access to the timeless perspective and transmit that insight to your conscious self through whatever mechanism they are connected by.
I've yet to hear a good argument against determinism, though. Not that is matters, our brains are obviously wired to pre-suppose free will, but nonetheless.
Sure, if you psychologically can't stomach the idea that the nature of some things might ultimately not be amenable to empirical methods. The only problem is you might be like the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp.
If a hypothesis is untestable by definition, then it's irrelevant. It doesn't matter if it's true or not because there's no way to distinguish any effect.
So sure, maybe our infinite soul communicates with our body from the future. But until you can show that that makes any sort of noticeable difference in reality, it's magical nonsense.
The movie builds on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The basic idea is that language changes how we think. The main character starts to think like the "aliens" because she starts to learn their language.
> Thought is necessary, time is necessary. To go from here to there time is necessary. And thought is necessary to drive a car, to take a bus or train. Thought is necessary, time is necessary at that level. Now I am saying as thought and time are the root of fear, is thought and time necessary psychologically? Are they? As long as you think time and thought are necessary, in the psychological world, in the world of the self, in the world of psyche, in the world of inside the skin, then you will be perpetually in fear. If you perceive that, if there is perception, not acceptance, that thought and time are the root of fear, then thought and time are necessary at the physical level but inwardly are not. Therefore the brain is actively watching itself every minute to see that thought and time do not enter into the realm where they are not necessary. This requires great attention, awareness, so that the brain, which has accumulated fear for centuries, or for one day, sees where they are necessary and where they are not. It watches like a hawk so that thought and time don't enter into the whole process of living. This is real discipline, this is learning. The root meaning of that word is disciple, one who learns, who is learning all the time, who never says, "I have learnt" and halts.
This is somewhat like my personal view of time. All points in time exist already, but because causality only flows in one direction (the Arrow of Time), the illusion of the passage of time is created. At any one point in time, your brain can only have stored memories about things that previously happened.
This kind of ties into my more general hypothesis that the universe is a single mathematical structure. And that all possible mathematical structures are as real as ours. But only some structures have conscious components within them (e.g. us) who can observe.
This does run into a wall with the Hard Problem of Consciousness. It's hard to imagine how a mathematical structure can produce self-awareness. But any alternate explanation is just as magical.
Mathematics is also mysticism. 1 is arbitrary. The senses can never perceive 1. So it is self-contained. There is no time without perception, and no perception without division. Consciousness perpetuates itself, but it has no reach outside its self-generated paradigm. Time is created by the witness, and the witness is time. It's a circle the mind cannot escape. If there is such a thing as a quantum computer, the mind cannot comprehend its output. Your hashes won't be broken.
Thats the problem I had with the concept when I saw the movie. Is a "moment" a unit of measurement, a unit of change, what is it? How is that purely continuous?
Bullshit. Whatever they think they have crystallized, according to an interpretation of reading of their instruments, which uses statistics and probability, is not time.
Time is a derived characteristic of an observed process and requires an observer, so it does not exist as an independent phenomena. Whatever they have convinced themselves it was, it is not time.
Yes, the scientists are full of bullshit, but your quasimystical interpretation of requiring an observer is insightful.
I think your post is just nonsense. Particularly because you used the phrase "crystalize time" rather than "crystalize matter in the time direction", which makes me wonder if you even know what a time crystal is.
Yes, some "modern science" is no different from astrology or metaphysics, nothing extraordinary here. Same dogmatic, unproven theological sectarian arguments about abstract concepts and fancy theoretical models.
This is literally a case of someone performing a test because the community thought the concept couldn't happen (after some debate).
That's pretty much exactly the opposite of dogmatic.
Let me ask you this, though: do you have a better idea of how to do science? Because it sounds like you're just whining science isn't perfect and modern science is hard/confusing.
Hard is not a problem. Confused and socially constructed is.
The scientific method is a process of reduction to the approximation the truth (of what is) by systematic elimination of nonsense, which is quite contrary to pseudo-scientific process of piling up speculative nonsense upon nonsense in order to gain a certain social status and funding, which is, by the way, is how theologians and "philosophers" of religion used to get their living.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadAll our measurements of time refer to the movement of matter: the rotation of the Earth, the orbit of Earth around the Sun, the swinging of a pendulum, the vibrations of a cesium atom.
Time travel is not possible. It would require the re-arrangements of atoms into exactly their former position, which is precluded by entropy. Too bad.
There is no past or future. There is only the forever "now".
You can't claim time doesn't exist, then offer a definition of time, which requires time to exist.
Also, general relativity would like to have a word with you after class.
Most science (I think) presumes that time was discovered (before recorded history for obvious reasons).
Critics argue that it's invented to help orient our perspective of events.
Special relativity gives us a perfectly workable view of time as a symmetry relation on this eternal now you speak of.
Thermodynamics, specifically the second law and especially in its kinetic theory, give us a nice view of time as a global statistics phenomenon of ensembles.
Even more, there are solutions to Einstein's equations, that seem to allow time travel.
All that said, you might be interested in the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation which takes a stab at quantum gravity and makes no mention of time. That said, it's also a far cry from the 20th century physics eternal now you seem to be envisioning.
your argument would actually be improved by switching it;
That matter is an abstraction to measure comparative rates of time.
Entropy always increases in one direction. If time doesn't exist then why does that asymmetry exist?
By a similar reasoning, you are always "here".
(But you are correct, in a way. Time does not exist by itself, i.e. separately from space.)
"The recipe was incredibly complex, but just three ingredients were essential: a force repeatedly disturbing the particles, a way to make the atoms interact with each other and an element of random disorder... More than that, the researchers found that even if they started to flip the system in an imperfect way, such as by slightly changing the frequency of the kicks, the oscillation remained the same."
To turn the halite crystal into a (hypercubic) time crystal, you would need to move your mental pointer in the time dimension and see the ions alternate, just as they did in the spatial dimensions. You could potentially do this by causing those ions to spontaneously transmute into each other, in a cyclic fashion. Or you could oscillate the crystal at just the right orientation and speed. But both of those are currently beyond our technical capabilities.
In theory, if ionic attraction behaved similarly in the time dimension as in spatial dimensions, there will be a particular resonant frequency of oscillation that would indicate that the halite had gone from a cubic spatial crystal to a hypercubic spacetime crystal. But that oscillation speed is likely associated with a temperature that would destroy the spatial crystal by melting it. Too bad. You probably can't turn a halite crystal into a spacetime crystal. If you had one already, it might be metastable enough to not melt, but as they say, you can't get there from here.
But we can flip the spin of an electron. So instead of making an ionic crystal, you make an electron spin crystal in an existing molecular lattice structure. Then you pulse a laser at it to make all of the spins flip. In that situation, the crystal structure lines up to ensure that the spin-flips occur at a particular rate. If you stop kicking at it, it stops being a crystal, just like going past the physical boundary of an ionic crystal. If you add more sodium and chloride to halite, you can make the crystal grow in spatial dimensions. Adding more laser energy to a spin crystal causes it to grow in the temporal dimension.
And like adding the ions, you don't have to line them up exactly before letting them go. You just dump them, and the crystal orders itself. So those sort-of-random kicks give enough extra energy that the time crystal can keep growing in the time dimension. If you stop kicking, the crystal might have enough internal "conductiveness" of that spin-flip energy to keep flipping by itself for a while just from the previous kicks you gave it, or even the ones you haven't given it yet. But crystals have finite boundaries. Eventually, you get to the end of the crystal in the temporal dimension, and it stops flipping. But we have no idea how long you will have to watch it before it stops, since we don't know exactly how time crystals work.
In the movie, the "alien" are not perceiving time like us, they experience it in a circular way, they also write in a circular way. There is no beginning and no end to what they write, it just happen. The main character, after having studied them for a long time, start to think like them, and she start to experience time like them. So she merely exist in the present, past and future, she just exist. You can take what you want, but for me it's like we maybe simply exist, at any given time, we can remember or/and live our past but also our future. We just exist, at any given moment of OUR time; You can BE at anytime between your birth and death. We're maybe just stuck in our current concept of time, like we maybe don't perceive other dimensions because they are "hidden" to our way of experiencing our world.
Enough talk anyway.
By studying how one dimension can be expanded into two, then three dimensions, it extrapolates and visualizes even higher dimensions.
http://www.tenthdimension.com/medialinks.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/
Writers: Eric Heisserer (screenplay), Ted Chiang (based on the story "Story of Your Life" written by)
"Zero AD" is not a year, AD (a.k.a. CE) begins with year 1.
So sure, maybe our infinite soul communicates with our body from the future. But until you can show that that makes any sort of noticeable difference in reality, it's magical nonsense.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti, Saanen 4th Public Talk 15th July 1984 - To Be Human - https://books.google.com/books?id=S8TU01Dd3moC&pg=PA86&lpg=P...
This kind of ties into my more general hypothesis that the universe is a single mathematical structure. And that all possible mathematical structures are as real as ours. But only some structures have conscious components within them (e.g. us) who can observe.
This does run into a wall with the Hard Problem of Consciousness. It's hard to imagine how a mathematical structure can produce self-awareness. But any alternate explanation is just as magical.
Time is a derived characteristic of an observed process and requires an observer, so it does not exist as an independent phenomena. Whatever they have convinced themselves it was, it is not time.
I think your post is just nonsense. Particularly because you used the phrase "crystalize time" rather than "crystalize matter in the time direction", which makes me wonder if you even know what a time crystal is.
That's pretty much exactly the opposite of dogmatic.
Let me ask you this, though: do you have a better idea of how to do science? Because it sounds like you're just whining science isn't perfect and modern science is hard/confusing.
Did you even read the article before ranting at the concept?
The scientific method is a process of reduction to the approximation the truth (of what is) by systematic elimination of nonsense, which is quite contrary to pseudo-scientific process of piling up speculative nonsense upon nonsense in order to gain a certain social status and funding, which is, by the way, is how theologians and "philosophers" of religion used to get their living.