On 27 December 2013 05:24, Edgar L. Owen <[email protected]> wrote: > John, > > You are talking about clock time simultaneity which is well understood in > relativity and which I accept and my theory is completely compatible with. > Clock time simultaneity has nothing to do with the present moment which is > an entirely separate type of time I call P-time. This is clear because > observers with different clock time t values always inhabit the exact same > present moment, the exact same moment of P-time which corresponds to the > actual universal common present moment which is the only time in which > reality exists. > > The present moment is the most fundamental self-evident experience of our > existence. And it is quite clear that all observers, no matter what their t > values, all exist within this same P-time present moment. > > Sorry to nag, but how can you show that observers "inhabit the same present moment" ? What does that mean in operational terms? In what sense am I occupying the same present moment as an observer orbiting a star 50 light years away, who is spacelike separated from me? Null geodesics - lines of simultaneity - connect me to his past. and his present to my future. There is no "common present" involved in any practical, measurable sense that I can see.
Or for a more extreme example, consider someone on the edge of the universe who is receeding from me at .9c - their clocks are not only running more slowly than mine when I measure them - as are mine when they measure them - they are occupying a different Hubble volume to me, with access to information I can never gain assuming the universal expansion continues (and vice versa). They probably won't ever be able to see SN1987, for example, no matter how hard they look, because they are maybe 12 billion light years away and the cosmic acceleration will take them over my cosmic event horizon before the light can reach them. It's all very well to say "that's just clock time" but you need to explain convincingly why there is anything *except* clock time in the universe. (An appeal to psychology and consciousness of course requires a definition of what those are. Comp does this very precisely, but I haven't yet seen you do so - please elucidate). I'm also still awaiting a refutation of the "relativity of simultaneity" argument that I have found in every physics book on the subject I've read. On a more general point, positing a "moving present" (i.e. the idea that the past ceases to exist and the future doesn't yet exist) requires an extra time dimension, which at least falls foul of Occam's Razor unless it can be shown to be necessary for some fundamental reason. I know of no reason that an extra time dimension is required to explain any physical phenomenon, and hence it should be treated with scepticism; it appears to only be necessary to make the universe make more intuitive sense (to some people), much like the "collapse of the wave function". PS Brent I'll be really happy if you don't obfuscate what I've said by throwing in references to advanced physics of only tangential relevance --- I just want to get the fundamentals sorted out as, Mr Owen sees them, before moving on to anything else :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
