On 26 January 2014 11:25, Stephen Paul King <[email protected]>wrote:
> Dear Russell, > > I agree, this has been pointed out by many. The Schroedinger's > equation uses the classical concept of time. The Wheeler-de Witt equation > sums over all possible universes and leads to a vanishing of the > classical concept of time. I have pointed to a very nice paper by Kitada > and Fletcher <http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9408027> that discusses this in > detail. > > I am trying to not get stuck on the classical notion of time and > instead focus on what the concept is trying to denote: > 1) a sequence of events > 2) a transition from one event to another. > >From this I picture a series of "events" - Hoylean pigeon holes, say - with something between them - a flashlight being moved, say - called "transitions". This indicates time is made of two distinct things. A sort of railway line of time, with "moments" clicking when you go over the joins between the rails, and smooth rails - "transitions" - in between each "event". Is that (very roughly and metaphorically) your intention? If we assume classical physics for a moment, there are no "transitions" in a 4D manifold, just positions along worldlines, which form a continuum in the classical limit. However, if we move to quantum theory, it's possible to get transitions - quantum steps from one state to another, like an electron jumping energy levels inside an atom. However, splitting time up using quantum transitions seems arbitary, since there is no known synchronisation tying them together. In between quantum transitions a free electron will describe a classical path (or rather a whole bunch of them). What it *doesn't* do, to the best of our knowledge, is describe a series of events + transitions. The same is true of any quantum object, except when it changes state. And we're made of quantum objects, so ... So why do you want to make time out to have this nature, when it's far from obvious that it does? (Indeed the very idea doesn't make much sense if you bring in Lorentz invariance and the order of these "events" and "transitions" get all mixed up.) -- 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.
