Mathmatically I can prove nothing ever touches anything....

[clarky]

Of course you can touch things! You can feel them, which means you can.

[Prometheus]

Quote by: tman_ndsu08 If it were as obvious as that, someone would've figured it out a hundred years ago...like we figured out slavery a hundred years ago.

100 years is dipshit in a historical context.

I had to pick a past example, a current example would be pointless since the topic is current social acceptance of a faulty idea.

[Jack]

This is just a some kid with a philosophy paper that is getting some buzz on the internet media. Who cares?

Don't be too quick to discount Peter Lynds. Check out this story in Wired magazine:

One of the bright spots in his life was that he'd recently fallen in love - with Einstein. Raiding the Wellington library, he pored over biographies like Denis Brian's Einstein: A Life and devoured explanations of the great theorist's work. One night he was watching the movie I.Q., with Walter Matthau as Einstein, Meg Ryan as his ditzy-yet-brainy niece, and Tim Robbins as a lovesick mechanic. When Robbins moves in on Ryan for a kiss, she attempts to fend him off with a 2,500-year-old paradox known as Zeno's dichotomy: Moving from point A to point B requires that you first cover half the distance, then half of the remaining distance, and so on - an insurmountable infinity of almost-theres that keeps you from point B. Robbins crashes through Zeno's logic by kissing Ryan anyway. It was just the thing to get Lynds off the couch: What if Zeno's real lesson isn't that movement from point A to point B is impossible (obviously it isn't), but rather that there is no such thing as a discrete slice of time? He went back to school that fall with the fervor and the audacity of the converted. During an office-hours argument with physicist David Beaglehole, Lynds pointed at the professor's coffee mug and demanded to know: At what "instant" would the mug not be moving if he dragged it across the desk? Exasperated, Beaglehole suggested that Lynds try to get his theory published, thinking that rejection from an academic journal would put the matter to rest. Lynds' paper, "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Continuity," is the latest chapter in a story that begins with Zeno and runs through Newton and Einstein to today. The question they struggled to answer: How does matter move through time and space? Newton described motion as a change in position over time. (In the process of figuring that out, he invented calculus.) That allowed for infinite series of infinitesimal steps, which polishes off Zeno. But for his model to make sense, Newton needed what he described as "absolute, true and mathematical time, which of itself flows equably without relation to anything external." It's a God clock, ticking out discrete instants, or, if you prefer, a universal CPU, doling out reality one cycle at a time, a series of static instants giving only the appearance of motion like the successive frames of a movie. But Einstein didn't buy it. The heart of relativity is that everything depends on your point of view - if you're traveling at close to the speed of light (a constant), then time moves differently for you than for your slowpoke friends back home. Einstein died before he had worked out the implications of his own brilliant ideas. Among the problems left unsolved: Time could go faster or slower (or even backward), but was it divisible? And were there irreducible "atoms" of time, quantum flecks now called chronons? Enter Lynds. In his theory, reality is merely sequences of events that happen relative to one another; time is an illusion. There's no chronon, no direction for time's arrow to fly, no "imaginary time" flowing 90 degrees off the axis of normal time. "I got to a point in my life where I was asking deeper and deeper questions," Lynds says. "If you want to understand reality, you have to get into physics. And if you're really interested in physics, you have to ask really big questions." His answers make the mathematics of space and time look strange. If instants don't exist, then calculus - in which equations depend on fixed before-and-after positions in space - doesn't accurately describe reality. And that means a fundamental indeterminacy connects the blurry probabilities of the quantum universe with the seemingly stable macroverse where you and I live. Uniting those two seemingly incompatible worldviews dogged Einstein until his death; Lynds is happy to help the great man out. A further realization: The human perception of time as a sequence of moments is just a neurological artifact, an outgrowth of the chunk-by-chunk way our brains perceive reality. As the famous geneticist J. B. S. Haldane said: The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine. For a while, the question of whether instants exist was superseded by the question of whether Lynds exists. His claims were so outlandish, the scandal they provoked so fervent, and his home country (apparently) so exotic that the Internet Museum of Hoaxes briefly decided Lynds wasn't real. He spent months corresponding with the webmaster to clear that up. This part of the Lynds controversy turns out to be the only mystery I could resolve without knowing advanced physics.

[oranged]

Quote by: Mr.Vicchio It can be done, it's an OLD game of "make fun of Math and Science" but it's also, infalliably true on paper. It also is quite easily disproven, even though it's mathmatically proven to be true. Make sense? I can prove you never EVER touch ANYTHING, EVER... Mathmatically. Yet it's obvious you do. Crazy huh? Anyone know this one?

Not true, the only things ever to touch each other are the nuetrons of a nuetron star.

[oranged]

Quote by: clarky Of course you can touch things! You can feel them, which means you can.

The reason things can not touch each other, exept nuetrons, is that there is an electromagnetic field repeling thing from each other, this field is the strongest thing ever by far. This is all on an unfathomably small scale. You can feel things, because your nuerons are sensative to this field, and with their own electrical pulses, the nuerons send messages back to the brain. Now, the science of the brain, I don't understand much of.

[Samildanach]

Time is linear

but thats the exact point that is being made. Time is not linear at all. Its an instant and we live within the instant (instant being defined as the smallest increment of indivisable time possible) Think of time as being that instant and your mind as being the video player which plays the instant rather slowly frame by frame, except there is only one frame and its being dragged out over 100 years your life span. You only ever get to see that one frame ie one picture on the set and that picture is the configuration of the universe.

[MerlinsByte]

If it were as obvious as that, someone would've figured it out a hundred years ago...like we figured out slavery a hundred years ago.

mb responds...what about the wheel? took us a few thousand years to figure that difficult concept out.

but thats the exact point that is being made. Time is not linear at all. Its an instant and we live within the instant (instant being defined as the smallest increment of indivisable time possible) Think of time as being that instant and your mind as being the video player which plays the instant rather slowly frame by frame, except there is only one frame and its being dragged out over 100 years your life span. You only ever get to see that one frame ie one picture on the set and that picture is the configuration of the universe.

mb.... Maybe I should have said that time is unbroken and linear. there are no instants. Time is different for every individual in existence according to an observer. I feel time is not circular or infinite. Space time started and will end when all matter evaporates (in the distant future) unless God or GID intervenes.[/quote]
That said I feel that we are in for a profound change to be discovered about the basic nature of time.


mb

[MerlinsByte]

The reason things can not touch each other, exept nuetrons, is that there is an electromagnetic field repeling thing from each other, this field is the strongest thing ever by far

Yes, for now, I agree with you. A neutron star is like pouring a cup of water (the neutrons) into the ocean (neutron star). However I cannot say that the neutrons physically touch....but you are correct as I have no proof that you are wrong...stay tuned.

mb

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.
- Carl Gustav Jung

[MerlinsByte]

Time is not linear at all. Its an instant and we live within the instant (instant being defined as the smallest increment of indivisible time possible) Think of time as being that instant and your mind as being the video player which plays the instant rather slowly frame by frame, except there is only one frame and its being dragged out over 100 years your life span. You only ever get to see that one frame i.e. one picture on the set and that picture is the configuration of the universe.

mb writes...I try to visualize time as being infinitely "divisible", but not "cut"! This means that you cannot divide time. There should be a better way to put that but its to0ooo early now...I need coffee. I will explain if anyone queries me on this last sentence.

My theory of how the universe works demands an outside observer (god or GID or?). This GID does not experience time as it is eternal and infinite, not needing time to exist. Matter is the clock. without matter (or energy which one can interchange with matter) we would have no need for the clock.

mb

[Samildanach]

If you look at time as something that is inherently infinitely divisible then you are IMO looking at it incorrectly. Mathematically you are looking at it like its a number, infinitely divisable. You should be looking at it like its an indivisable instant according to the solution of the Xeno paradox. In effect you should be viewing time not as a divisable number but as an indivisable one ie zero. apparently that is more of a true representation of time...not divisable and however you try to divide it you end up with the same thing.

[tman_ndsu08]

.I try to visualize time as being infinitely "divisible", but not "cut"!

If it's divisible, then by definition it can be cut.

The very definition of SdT is taking all the infinitely small slices and adding them up to get the whole T.

[MerlinsByte]

mb...Hmmmm this calls for some chopin...

http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/chopin.html


Time does not exist, it an explanation of the decay of matter. An abstract concept. We, being made of that matter cannot understand time, only measure it or explain it. Are we on the same page on even in the same book? Maybe in the next paragraph we will merge or mind meld us, as a famous Vulcan would say…

The "life time moment" is the zero, correct? i.e. it cannot be divided because it = zero. So that life time instant (or "zero") represents all time to that particular individual experiencing it. Death is what then? If you are an atheist or don't believe in an eternal afterlife. Is death the end of time?

When I said time is linear and cannot be cut I meant that each of our time lines are separate and cannot be divided because it isn't a physical thing, to say that the lifetime is a snapshot or a slow video with almost infinite frames, is the same as saying that the mathematically expression is the reality, and this isn't true I feel

I think we each live (experience the universe) in a different in space time because any two sentient's, or objects experience time different i.e. one is the observer and the other acting as the observed. (This doesnt include a GOD/GID as an Large frame of reference observer which complicates everthing !) The primary causative effect is time dilation effect of light speed c on these (at least) two bodies. There are other causes but this is the only one we need concern ourselves with in this debate.

I will stop here and see if we understand each other. Thanks for your clarification sam.

[Samildanach]

You dont believe that everything in the universe can be brought down to one extremely complicated....or maybe very simple mathematical expression?

another idea springs to mind.....maybe we re-use the SAME instant over and over and this gives the illusion of a continuous linear sequence. But technically it is indivisible from itself.

[MerlinsByte]

You dont believe that everything in the universe can be brought down to one extremely complicated....or maybe very simple mathematical expression?

You should know me by now Samildanach, I don't think anything is impossible, and I would even hope we one day could have an elegant GUT or TOE that explains everything. I am pessimistic that that is going to happen soon ….why?

I feel that our universe is making itself up as it goes along (I'm again leaving my belief in God/Gid out as it complicates all this but fits in). Many theoretical physicists think along this line.

So, there is no anwser only a incomplete question (or math. problem) because now we don't have the tools to explain the universe, and our brain is another limiting factor. I am hoping that with the coming AI revolution and brain to computer (maybe even Quantum computers! fingers crossed) interfaces we can overcome this problem. We are trying to model an our universe on a Pentium 2 computer when it might take a bank of super computers to give us a rudimentary understandable GUT or TOE, I fear.

That's my thoughts and the way I must view my universe ... hopefully we can become one big brain soon...and cypher this thing out...eh?

mb

[Samildanach]

I feel that our universe is making itself up as it goes along

Funny, my gut instinct says its much more simple than that. More like the universe is a static picture...well not a static picture but a thing ......ummm no...not a note....more like....an idea....yes thats it. The universe is an idea.

The universe and the world around you is a direct reflection of your idea of yourself if that makes any sense.

[MerlinsByte]

The universe and the world around you is a direct reflection of yourself."

You are getting closer to believing as I do...that's OK don't kill yourself just yet! : } >
The very concept of the universe being a product of an Idea, or similar processes, would be central to my beliefs. (thoughts and ideas are like the stuff of the afterlife and god/gid. thoughts seem to be produced from the biochemical/electrical processes of our brain. however, our thoughts are separate from our matter based brain and are products of quantum (2) events and other processes.

While all matter and energy including black holes have a finite lifetime I feel that our "thoughts and ideas are eternal." I feel that while our thoughts effect our temporal universe they also inhabit a dimension or space that we know nothing of (yet). This could be visualized as a zero point virtual energy fluctuation(1), well similar to that but not the same. Thoughts may be like neutrinos which have no measurable mass but are real and detectable.

1....http://www.geocities.com/iona_m/Cosm...Engineer2.html
2....http://www.thymos.com/tat/consc3.htm...mindgames.html





mb

[Samildanach]

The very concept of the universe being a product of an Idea

I am not sure the universe is the product of an idea....I think it IS the idea. This is silly because it makes no sense but it FEELS true to me...weird.

[MerlinsByte]

I am not sure the universe is the product of an idea....I think it IS the idea. This is silly because it makes no sense but it FEELS true to me...weird.

merlin writes...I dont think there silly or wrong questions or ideas, theories etc.. Some are more probable than others, that's all. And some very improbable theories are now fact (or as close as they can be to fact!)

Your Idea is plausible. Maybe thoughts or ideas splits or effects the time line much like a measurement effects a particle in a Quantum double slit experimented thus effecting the destiny and the destiny of the observer/measurer?

And how is it possible to make a conscious decision that effects any mass matter (all thoughts can effect matter) and notchange the future of the entire universe?

mb





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