Julian Barbour & Time

[SoCurious]

Shijing,

Thanks very much for your explanation.

The other important ingredient in this schema is the wave function, which is complex, comprised of two components: the real and imaginary parts; when these two components are added and squared, the result gives the intensity of the complex wave function, which will vary from region to region.

I have to admit that this is too complex for me. I can't really visualize the wave function and am going to have to mull over it, probably for a very long time.

From 3D consciousness I agree it doesn't make much sense that our consciousness is split, but from 5D the consciousness existing in all possibilities within a particular incarnation might not be a big deal. Us in 5D would be learning all possible lessons from a particular incarnation but that doesn't mean it comes nearly close to all lessons that could possibly be learned. Just a thought.

 

[John G]

The other important ingredient in this schema is the wave function, which is complex, comprised of two components: the real and imaginary parts; when these two components are added and squared, the result gives the intensity of the complex wave function, which will vary from region to region...

What is nice about this is that it allows 'everything possible' to exist simultaneously, but doesn't descend into a realm of intuitive absurdity which characterizes something like the 'many worlds' hypothesis, where each decision point splits the universe into two separate but equal realities ad infinitum.

You definitely need some kind of decoherence (choosing a now configuration) for the "many worlds" view. You only split during the decoherence time (which gives you all your probabilistic choices) and then you pick one now and you are only conscious of part of that "now". A "now" includes a normal time dimension in the models I know of. This could allow "massless" entities (like the Cs perhaps) to perceive in a "now" a full worldline through time (but not all worldlines of the "now"). So basically a "now" is one possible configuration of spacetime.

That is a normal wave equation; wave equations come from conformal symmetry and Barbour is using Weyl's conformal structures (which I've seen related to the Segal ones that Ark uses).

http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/USGRFckb.html

P. A. M. Dirac, in his paper Wave Equations in Conformal Space, Ann. Math. 37 (1936) 429-442, reprinted in The Collected Works of P. A. M. Dirac: Volume 1: 1924-1948, by P. A. M. Dirac (author), Richard Henry Dalitz (editor), Cambridge University Press (1995), at pages 823-836, said:

"... by passing to a four-dimensional conformal space ... a ... greater symmetry of ... equations of physics ... is shown up, and their invariance under a wider group is demonstrated. ... The spin wave equation ... seems to be the only simple conformally invariant wave equation involving the spin matrices. ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation

Thus the Schrödinger equation may be seen as the far non-relativistic approximation of the Dirac equation when one may neglect spin and work only at low energies and velocities. This also was a great triumph for the new equation, as it traced the mysterious i that appears in it, and the necessity of a complex wave function, back to the geometry of space-time through the Dirac algebra. It also highlights why the Schrödinger equation, although superficially in the form of a diffusion equation, actually represents the propagation of waves.

The only thing that would worry me about Barbour is that he might use his decoherence to get rid of some of the time-travel-like aspects of conformal gravity but I've really only read about conformal structures in general not the exact way that Barbour is using it. For me he kind of seems to be using physical conformal spacetime as a configuration protospace which would be more OK if we were talking 7th density information math instead of 4th density spacetime math.

 

[Sideshow]

Re: Julan Barbour & Discover Magazine +

I read a review somewhere, of his book, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics. It was said that Barbour asserts that time (and motion) simply doesn't exist. He supports the Wheeler-Dewitt equation that promotes the idea of the entire universe as a huge molecule in a stationary state. The different possible configurations of this "molecule" are the instants of time.

Einstein theorized time as "ONE universal time in ONE universal context", Barbour asserts "no time". No one seems to consider anything like an ensemble of Planck times aggregating upscale from the Quantum level.

Penrose-Hammeroff's Orchestrated Objective Reduction is a model with nice explanations of consciousness, anesthesia, non-local consciousness and altered states but it's also built on existing models of Quantum Mechanics, and therefore bound to be wrong at some point, OSIT.

To some people, Orch-Or seems to me to be the best of a bad bunch, and at this point, survey still says: Don't know.

I too, just caught the article on Barbour in the March issue of Discover. Fortunately Barbour also makes some of his papers available at his website.

Barbour often refers to Einstein's version of the Mach Principle, which is that inertia is *relative* to all other matter in the universe. This principle is an answer to Newton's fabulous bucket experiment that purported to demonstrate that inertia is absolute in Newtonian space. This is also demonstrated by gyroscopes that provide an absolute reference for airplanes and spacecraft. What Barbour says is that Einstein did not go far enough in relativising physics, although it is amazing that he went as far as he did, given that he was a dead-set realist.

This difference in philosophical insight is under-appreciated by physical theorists, including Barbour himself. Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation is a relativistic solution that creates an entirely relativistic universe from the bottom up. Bohr's reality pops in-and-out of "existence", creating a fleeting statistical real world at our level of magnification.

Barbour is correct in that General Relativity needs to be revised to close the gap by ridding itself of a fixed, four-dimensional space-time. That kind of eternalism only extends Aristotle's limited world by a couple of dimensions. But shifting back to Platonic realism, which is devoid of time, where existence is just a sequence of flip-cards without any indication of time, cannot be a complete answer.

 

[SeekinTruth]

Hi, sideshow. Welcome to the forum. It's recommended for new members to post an intro in the Newbies section. Just to tell how you found your way here and how much of the material you've read. :)

 

[truth seeker]

Just for your information sideshow, that thread is here: http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/board,39.0.html
:)

 

[Buddy]

...shifting back to Platonic realism, which is devoid of time, where existence is just a sequence of flip-cards without any indication of time, cannot be a complete answer.

Agreed. Personally I don't recall ever buying into "One Size Fits All" (one time for all contexts in this case). I don't 'feel' it. What makes sense to me would likely be described as multiple 'timings' or 'co-ordinations', from the 'smallest' unit of quantum flux at Planck rate and at Planck scale to the imperceptibly slow at cosmic scale. That I can feel, from b*lls to bones, as the Oracle would say.

Are you aware Quantum (hologrammic, holographic) understandings are popping up here and there to help break the spell of the Subject-Object Metaphysicians? If not, you may be interested in:

"Quantum Biology"
_http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070116133617.htm

"Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes" by Mark H. Gaffney
_http://www.amazon.com/Gnostic-Secrets-Naassenes-Initiatory-Teachings/dp/089281697X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333935127&sr=1-1
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,17124.msg150994.html#msg150994

"Shufflebrain", by Paul Pietsch
_http://www.instinct.org/texts/shufflebrain/shufflebrain-book00.html

"The Holographic Universe", by Michael Talbot
_http://www.amazon.com/The-Holographic-Universe-Michael-Talbot/dp/0060922583
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,3461.msg21996.html#msg21996

...among others.

BTW, welcome to the forum.

 

[Sideshow]

Buddy,
Thank you for your kind welcome, and for the references for further thought. :)

The hologramic mind is a fascinating subject. Memory and thought cannot possibly be the consequence of linear processing, whether it be digital or analog, because the total number of physical combinations is inadequate to explain the complexity of the mind. Consider the sea slug which has only nine neurons, yet is capable of a reasonable array of responses and innate behavior, for example. Something must be missing from our understanding of being.

 

[Buddy]

Consider the sea slug which has only nine neurons, yet is capable of a reasonable array of responses and innate behavior, for example. Something must be missing from our understanding of being.

Well, I would imagine nine neurons to be enough to decode the sensory input relevant to a sea slug. I'm clueless as to its sensory band (Perspicacities and Perspicuities), but tend to think the idea of holographic mind in this case is the storing of information at all 'points' of the slugs being as it is processed. I see no reason to assume separation between mind and body here, so the slug's 'thinking' and 'doing' would essentially be the same thing, no? Sort of like the idea of 'animism' as fundamental mode of human consciousness?

But shifting back to Platonic realism, which is devoid of time, where existence is just a sequence of flip-cards without any indication of time, cannot be a complete answer.

May I presume you to be familiar with the bulk of work that's been researched on here? Specifically I'm reminded of Kurt Gödel's two famous Incompleteness Theorems. (Did you know Gödel's work serves as core primitive concepts of PaleoChristianity?) Taking these two Theorems together, one may infer that for any system to be 'complete', it must contain inconsistencies, and for any system to be fully consistent, it cannot be complete.

How much more 'middle-included, dialectic myth-busting power' could a person ask for? :)

 

[bngenoh]

I thought of this thread when I read this:

The theory of time running out was devised by researchers from two Spanish universities trying to explain why the universe appeared to be spreading continuously and accelerating.

Observations of supernovae, or exploding stars, found the movement of light indicated they were moving faster than those nearer to the centre of the universe.

But the scientists claimed the accepted theory of an opposite force to gravity, known as dark energy, was wrong, and said the reality was that the growth of the universe was slowing.

Professor Jose Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raul Vera from the University of the Basque Country and the University of Salamanca said the deceleration of time was so gradual, it was imperceptible to humans.

Their proposal, published in the journal Physical Review D, claimed dark energy does not exist and that time was winding down to the point when it would finally grind to a halt long after the planet ceased to exist. The slowing down of time will eventually mean everything will appear to take place faster and faster until it eventually disappears. Professor Senovilla told the New Scientist: "Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, for ever."

Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist the University of Cambridge, told the news website RT that the idea was not as absurd as it sounded.

That freezing of everything reminds me of this:

It has been known that that despite its solid appearance, glass and gels are actually in a "jammed" state of matter - somewhere between liquid and solid - that moves very slowly.

[...]

Work so far has concentrated on trying to understand the traffic jam, but now Paddy Royall from the University of Bristol, with colleagues in Canberra and Tokyo, has shown that glass fails to be a solid due to the special atomic structures that form in a glass when it cools.

[...]

Royall is part of a group of scientists who think that if you wait long enough, perhaps billions of years, all glass will eventually crystallize into a true solid. In other words, glass is not in an equilibrium state, (although it appears that way to us during our limited lifetimes).

"This is not universally accepted," Royall told LiveScience. "Our work will go some way to making that point more accepted. I think there is a growing weight of evidence that certainly many glasses 'want' to be a crystal."

Still, glass "looks like a liquid and this is one of the great riddles that we have gone some way to solving," Royall said. "It has always been thought that glass has same structure as a liquid, and that's why it looks like it. It does not have same structure as liquid."

Maybe just like glass and it's bizzare properties, time will also crystallize and maybe that is the completion of a universe. ;)

 

[obyvatel]

But the scientists claimed the accepted theory of an opposite force to gravity, known as dark energy, was wrong, and said the reality was that the growth of the universe was slowing.

Using the word "reality" in the context of the universe growing/slowing is presumptuous.

[quote author=bngenoh]

Their proposal, published in the journal Physical Review D, claimed dark energy does not exist and that time was winding down to the point when it would finally grind to a halt long after the planet ceased to exist. The slowing down of time will eventually mean everything will appear to take place faster and faster until it eventually disappears. Professor Senovilla told the New Scientist: "Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, for ever."

Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist the University of Cambridge, told the news website RT that the idea was not as absurd as it sounded.

That freezing of everything reminds me of this:
[/quote]
It reminds me of STS dream of annihilation of creation.

[quote author=bngenoh]
Maybe just like glass and it's bizzare properties, time will also crystallize and maybe that is the completion of a universe. ;)
[/quote]

Glass is real - whether we consider its properties bizarre or not. Completion of a universe is fantasy - osit.

 

[Mikey]

[quote author=bngenoh]
Maybe just like glass and it's bizzare properties, time will also crystallize and maybe that is the completion of a universe. ;)
[/quote]

Glass doesn't have bizarre properties, objectively speaking. It just happens to appear transparent to our eyes because of the limited spectrum we can perceive. If we had a different kind of eyes it would appear opaque and other materials would appear transparent.

 

[John G]

[quote author=bngenoh]

Their proposal, published in the journal Physical Review D, claimed dark energy does not exist and that time was winding down to the point when it would finally grind to a halt long after the planet ceased to exist. The slowing down of time will eventually mean everything will appear to take place faster and faster until it eventually disappears. Professor Senovilla told the New Scientist: "Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, for ever."

Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist the University of Cambridge, told the news website RT that the idea was not as absurd as it sounded.

That freezing of everything reminds me of this:

It reminds me of STS dream of annihilation of creation.
[/quote]

I like a model where a spacetime vertex can be blocked (via a Planck mass black hole) and very old cold large universes would get lots of them; but even if those spacetime locations exist, that doesn't mean we have to go there since time isn't linear like that STS dream says.

 

[dant]

Glass: transparency explained:
_http://science.howstuffworks.com/question404.htm (in layman terms)
_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_and_translucency
_http://www.last-word.com/content_handling/show_tree/tree_id/2833.html

Glass: Solid or liquid?
_http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html
_http://dwb.unl.edu/Teacher/NSF/C01/C01Links/www.ualberta.ca/~bderksen/florin.html
_http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070809130014.htm
_http://www.glasslinks.com/newsinfo/physics.htm

Transparent metals:
_http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/2009/03/25/maybe-scotty-did-invent-transparent-aluminum/
_http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090312180838.htm
_http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17515-transparent-metal-hints-at-nature-of-planets-cores.html

 

[bngenoh]

But the scientists claimed the accepted theory of an opposite force to gravity, known as dark energy, was wrong, and said the reality was that the growth of the universe was slowing.

Using the word "reality" in the context of the universe growing/slowing is presumptuous.

From your perspective it is, but only because they do not have the data & tools that you posses. ;)

Q: Okay. I can do that. Onto the other questions. One of the ancient apocryphal texts recounts the story that Joseph, husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus, described the night that Jesus was born and in that account, he described an event that could only be "frozen time." In other words, he said that time stopped. He described people sitting at dinner with their food half-way to their mouths, arms frozen, jaws frozen in the act of chewing, and the same effect with cattle and so forth. But, that he was on his way to get a midwife when this occurred. Did, in fact, time stop at the time of the birth of Jesus?
A: Time "stops" for many at many times according to their individual sensitivity levels.

Q: According to sensitivity level. Why does sensitivity level have something to do with time stopping?
A: It has stopped for you too.

Q: Does it ever stop for the whole planet at once?
A: It never "started."

Glass doesn't have bizarre properties, objectively speaking. It just happens to appear transparent to our eyes because of the limited spectrum we can perceive. If we had a different kind of eyes it would appear opaque and other materials would appear transparent.

But objectively speaking, there is no supernatural or paranormal, only natural & normal. ;)

Thanks for the links dant, I will gladly check them out to banish my ignorance. :D

 

[obyvatel]

Q: Okay. I can do that. Onto the other questions. One of the ancient apocryphal texts recounts the story that Joseph, husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus, described the night that Jesus was born and in that account, he described an event that could only be "frozen time." In other words, he said that time stopped. He described people sitting at dinner with their food half-way to their mouths, arms frozen, jaws frozen in the act of chewing, and the same effect with cattle and so forth. But, that he was on his way to get a midwife when this occurred. Did, in fact, time stop at the time of the birth of Jesus?
A: Time "stops" for many at many times according to their individual sensitivity levels.

Q: According to sensitivity level. Why does sensitivity level have something to do with time stopping?
A: It has stopped for you too.

Q: Does it ever stop for the whole planet at once?
A: It never "started."

I do not think "time" as understood by the article you quoted and the sense in which "time" is used in the above transcript is the same - but I could be mistaken.

Glass doesn't have bizarre properties, objectively speaking. It just happens to appear transparent to our eyes because of the limited spectrum we can perceive. If we had a different kind of eyes it would appear opaque and other materials would appear transparent.

But objectively speaking, there is no supernatural or paranormal, only natural & normal. ;)

Are you saying that the properties of glass and "bizarre/supernatural/paranormal" are in the same category?

Bngenoh, generally, you bring up interesting topics to discuss in the forum and that is appreciated. In recent times, it seems like there is a trend in some of your posts where you get carried away with some of the stuff you are reading and mix apples and oranges. Your last post has a reactive tone to it. Maybe something worth exploring - if you choose to do so.

Edit: Maybe you are going too fast? If you want to exercise your critical thinking muscles, you would need to slow down a bit. At the moment, it seems that you are skewed more on the side of associative thinking.