On 6/22/2012 4:11 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 Stephen P. King <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I think that we agree that [time] transitions are occurring!
Maybe time changes as a smooth transition, maybe it's a series of
discrete jumps, it would look the same to us either way, and even if
our best instruments were a billion trillion trillion times as
sensitive as they are they still could not detect the granularity in
time if it was as small as the Plank Time level.
Hi John,
This quantization of time is easily seen as problematic when we
consider that SR tells us that any granulation of time is equivalent to
a grnulation of space which has observable effect. Basically it predicts
violations of Lorentz invariance by ultra high energy photons. So far
observations have not shown any violations, even in very high gamma rays
from GRBs. see: http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4927
> we cannot think of time as just a ordered collection of entities.
I don't see why not.
Ordered collections alone do not have transitions. This is part of
my argument against Bruno's idea of abstract implementation.
> Just because we can get a from a concatenation of "physical
constants" does not make it a physical constant.
True, but it's also true that a simple formula produces units of time
[Gh/c^5]^1/2 = 5.38 * 10-44 second. so it's not hard to imagine that
there is something special about 5.38 * 10^-44 seconds, and there is
no logical reason to think that time must be continuous, and there is
little or no experimental evidence that it is, and our best theories
suddenly start producing nonsense at times less than that; so until we
have reason to think otherwise using Occam's Razor I think our default
position should be that just like matter and energy and momentum and
spin, time is not continuous but quantized
Your reasoning here is good but it ignores the implied violation of
Lorentz invariance.
>The word "Free" means that it is not forced or coerced.
Sometimes I can not do exactly what my will wants me to do, in fact
usually that is the case. Sometimes I can't do what I want because
other people prevent me and sometimes I can't do what I want (move
faster than the speed of light, walk through a brick wall, jump over a
mountain) because the laws of physics prevent me. I see no
fundamental reason why one class of restrictions is "coercion" but the
other class is not, thus "free will" means you can't always get what
you want and nobody has free will, even God does not have free will
because according to theologians God wants us to obey him and be happy
but His creations keep malfunctioning and so even He can't always get
what he wants. He can't get no satisfaction either.
John K Clark
That's a good thing, otherwise we would be completely incorrigible. :-P
--
Onward!
Stephen
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
~ Francis Bacon
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