On 26 January 2014 08:54, Stephen Paul King <[email protected]>wrote:
> >> Either way the concept of a block universe is one of the most mind >> blowingly moronic ideas anyone ever came up with. It reminds me of the >> ideas me and my buddies used to come up with in Jr. High School just for >> laughs but which no one was dumb enough to ever take seriously. >> > > But people actually do, very smart people too! > >> Even I do, so not just smart people. Stephen, you have to provide some reason why the block universe concept, which was used in both Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, is wrong. Your attempt using QM misused the concept of simultaneity, and in any case QM works fine it you make the block universe into a block multiverse - all the quantum probabilities come out correctly, as per Everett, from a deterministic evolution. The fact that it's a block Hilbert space (or whatever) doesn't stop time evolution being mapped along a dimension. That is all 'block universe" means - that time is a dimension. There is no problem with change in a block universe. Change occurred in the past, which is a good example of a block universe. No one has refuted that argument as yet, and in fact they can't - the past clearly *is* a block universe, by all the definitions given, one that extends from the big bang to just before the present. The logical inference is that it continues through the present into the future, and our feeling that time "flows" is an illusion (no one has ever explained what that metaphor means, by the way, except with reference to a second time stream - but that just moves the block universe from 4D to 5D). The argument from incredulity has never worked very well in science. A lot of things that people couldn't get their heads around turned out to be true. But for most physicists the BU isn't one of them, it has long been understood and accepted. Anyone who draws a graph with a time axis implicitly accepts it. Anyone who describes time as a dimension implicitly accepts it. No sensible alternative has ever been proposed. Saying that "it doesn't explain becoming" is disproved with reference to the past - clearly things became other things in the past. -- 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.
