Jul 20, 2020 07:13 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 20, 2020 07:47 PM by C C.)
Deconstructing time using Lorentz transformations, special relativity, and entropy
https://medium.com/@diningphilosopher/ti...dd947fcf9d
"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." --Albert Einstein
INTRO (Viraj Kulkarni): Imagine for a moment that you are having a conversation with a caveman. You tell him that the sun he sees in the sky every day is the same sun. A new sun does not emerge from beyond the hills every morning, and neither does it drown into the sea every evening.
‘Oh, but it has to be a new sun. It comes up from here, and it goes down there!’, he retorts, his hands spread out pointing in opposite directions. You shake your head. Before explaining how the earth rotates around itself and revolves around the sun, you urge him: ‘Okay, just hear me out with an open mind…’
Here’s the thing about time: it is not real. There is nothing special about the present moment; in fact, a universal present moment does not even exist. The past and the future are equal in all respects. Our notion that time flows irreversibly from the past into the future is an illusion born out of our ignorance about the world. It exists only in our subjective perceptions [like the experiential meanings of color, taste, sound, etc] and not as part of objective reality.
Modern physics makes these statements very convincingly and leaves little room to refute them. Let’s look at time and deconstruct it in this article. Let’s do it keeping an open mind... (see article for lengthy, technical details after intro)
EXCERPTS (from wrap-up): [...] Einstein says that time and space do exist even in the absence of tangible matter, but they are not absolute; they are made of the same stuff that other things like tables, chairs, protons, and electrons are made of. Spacetime is a gravitational field. Like other fields, it is neither absolute nor uniform. It influences other fields and, in turn, gets influenced by them. Thus, we strike down the second pillar. Time does not exist independently on its own.
We believe there is a fundamental distinction between the past and the future. The past has already happened. We may not remember all the details exactly, but we know pretty much what happened. We cannot change the past. The milk has been spilled, and we should not cry about it. The future, on the other hand, is yet to happen. All possibilities are open. Planning finances, talking to our spouses, negotiating with our employers, self-introspecting, exercising, learning — all these things we do to influence and shape the future into what we want.
In the fundamental laws of physics that describe reality, however, there is no distinction between the past and the future. The equations given in Newton’s laws of motion, Einstein’s relativity, Maxwell’s electromagnetism, or Schrödinger’s quantum mechanics are all reversible; they treat the past and the future as if they were equal in all respects. The equation that governs the motion of a ball rolling down a slope also governs the ball rolling up the slope — and it doesn’t care whether the ball is moving from up to down or from down to up. If there is no difference between the past and the future, why do we remember the past but not the future?
There is only one law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future, the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of an isolated system can only increase or remain the same, but it can never decrease. So what is entropy, and what does it have to do with time? Entropy is a measure of disorder in the system. Consider the...
[...] We said that an intact teacup is more special or peculiar than a shattered teacup. But, if you decide to list down the exact location of each molecule that forms the teacup, you will find that every possible configuration is equally special and can occur with the same probability as any other configuration. The sense of order and disorder emerges because we differentiate between a teacup on one hand and all broken configurations on the other. If we were to individually differentiate between every possible configuration in which the cup can shatter, we would find each configuration to be special and peculiar and equiprobable. In such a case, entropy has no meaning.
Entropy is not a fundamental property. It is, like temperature and pressure, a statistical one. If you isolate a single particle, it has no entropy of its own. Entropy exists because we see reality in a blurred and approximate fashion. It exists because we cannot distinguish between the innumerable micro-configurations of the macro-states we observe. If you assimilate complete information about the exact microscopic subatomic state of the world around you, will the flow of time disappear?
Yes! With complete information about the state of the world, the difference between the past and the future vanishes. The passage of time is a distortion of reality that emerges due to our imperfect knowledge. Time thus is born out of our ignorance... (MORE)
https://medium.com/@diningphilosopher/ti...dd947fcf9d
"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." --Albert Einstein
INTRO (Viraj Kulkarni): Imagine for a moment that you are having a conversation with a caveman. You tell him that the sun he sees in the sky every day is the same sun. A new sun does not emerge from beyond the hills every morning, and neither does it drown into the sea every evening.
‘Oh, but it has to be a new sun. It comes up from here, and it goes down there!’, he retorts, his hands spread out pointing in opposite directions. You shake your head. Before explaining how the earth rotates around itself and revolves around the sun, you urge him: ‘Okay, just hear me out with an open mind…’
Here’s the thing about time: it is not real. There is nothing special about the present moment; in fact, a universal present moment does not even exist. The past and the future are equal in all respects. Our notion that time flows irreversibly from the past into the future is an illusion born out of our ignorance about the world. It exists only in our subjective perceptions [like the experiential meanings of color, taste, sound, etc] and not as part of objective reality.
Modern physics makes these statements very convincingly and leaves little room to refute them. Let’s look at time and deconstruct it in this article. Let’s do it keeping an open mind... (see article for lengthy, technical details after intro)
EXCERPTS (from wrap-up): [...] Einstein says that time and space do exist even in the absence of tangible matter, but they are not absolute; they are made of the same stuff that other things like tables, chairs, protons, and electrons are made of. Spacetime is a gravitational field. Like other fields, it is neither absolute nor uniform. It influences other fields and, in turn, gets influenced by them. Thus, we strike down the second pillar. Time does not exist independently on its own.
We believe there is a fundamental distinction between the past and the future. The past has already happened. We may not remember all the details exactly, but we know pretty much what happened. We cannot change the past. The milk has been spilled, and we should not cry about it. The future, on the other hand, is yet to happen. All possibilities are open. Planning finances, talking to our spouses, negotiating with our employers, self-introspecting, exercising, learning — all these things we do to influence and shape the future into what we want.
In the fundamental laws of physics that describe reality, however, there is no distinction between the past and the future. The equations given in Newton’s laws of motion, Einstein’s relativity, Maxwell’s electromagnetism, or Schrödinger’s quantum mechanics are all reversible; they treat the past and the future as if they were equal in all respects. The equation that governs the motion of a ball rolling down a slope also governs the ball rolling up the slope — and it doesn’t care whether the ball is moving from up to down or from down to up. If there is no difference between the past and the future, why do we remember the past but not the future?
There is only one law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future, the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of an isolated system can only increase or remain the same, but it can never decrease. So what is entropy, and what does it have to do with time? Entropy is a measure of disorder in the system. Consider the...
[...] We said that an intact teacup is more special or peculiar than a shattered teacup. But, if you decide to list down the exact location of each molecule that forms the teacup, you will find that every possible configuration is equally special and can occur with the same probability as any other configuration. The sense of order and disorder emerges because we differentiate between a teacup on one hand and all broken configurations on the other. If we were to individually differentiate between every possible configuration in which the cup can shatter, we would find each configuration to be special and peculiar and equiprobable. In such a case, entropy has no meaning.
Entropy is not a fundamental property. It is, like temperature and pressure, a statistical one. If you isolate a single particle, it has no entropy of its own. Entropy exists because we see reality in a blurred and approximate fashion. It exists because we cannot distinguish between the innumerable micro-configurations of the macro-states we observe. If you assimilate complete information about the exact microscopic subatomic state of the world around you, will the flow of time disappear?
Yes! With complete information about the state of the world, the difference between the past and the future vanishes. The passage of time is a distortion of reality that emerges due to our imperfect knowledge. Time thus is born out of our ignorance... (MORE)