For not particular reason, Nathan's last segment reminded me of a Buddhist (or Hindu) painting I once saw. It was the Wheel of Life and depicted birth, growing up, adolescence, adult maturity, work, accomplishment, then old age, sickness and death. All then to begin anew with birth.
Tedder, I have a feeling that you're gonna love the painting I've chosen for next week's essay. It's called Vicious Circle, and it was painted by Polish artist Jacek Malczewski back in 1897. And it's almost exactly like what you've described!
Epicycles were brilliant math and the basic fact remains. We are the center of our view of the universe. We still refer to the sun as rising in the east and setting in the west.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is this narrative flow, from past to future.
As the basis of thought, it is foundational to knowledge and all of human culture. Much as the earth appears still and the heavens swirl overhead.
The evident fact though, is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. The physical process of determination turns potential to residual. Mathematical operators are verbs.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
The event of the batter swinging at the ball and the ball flying away cannot co-exist, because it was the same energy manifesting both and it is the transition of that energy, from cause to effect, that creates this flow of time.
So energy is conserved simply because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, sound, vision, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, similar to how GR correlates distance with duration, but we don't confuse them with space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and body functions, as sequence is to thought.
The present goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past, because energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.
As it is our digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, there does tend to be this cognitive focus on the patterns, as these structured forms are what our mind rap around, yet take into account this relationship between energy and information.
In the higher ends of the spectrum, enormous amounts of information can be stored with very little energy, given effective mechanisms. Look at computers.
Yet in the lower ends of the spectrum, energy rules and models, systems, doctrines, disciplines, ideologies, etc. rule by being more dynamically powerful than the others. Diplomacy versus war.
So ask yourself, how intertwined is that symphony between frequency/time and amplitude/temperature?
"The event of the batter swinging at the ball and the ball flying away cannot co-exist, because it was the same energy manifesting both and it is the transition of that energy, from cause to effect, that creates this flow of time."
I love your way with word, John. I'll admit, this line gave me pause. But the premise here is that swing of the bat and the flight of the ball don't actually lose their existence once energy transfers. Rather, they're distinct coordinate points along a 4-dimensional continuum.
Imagine a TV broadcast of the ballgame on film:
When you look at a roll of physical film, frame 10 shows the bat striking the ball, and frame 20 shows the ball flying into the outfield. The kinetic energy transfer happens as you advance through the frames. But if you unroll the entire reel of film onto a table, frame 10 and frame 20 exist simultaneously on the table's surface.
The "flow" of energy moving from cause to effect is our internal, biological experience of traveling through the film. This is described by you perfectly.
In the 4D spacetime manifold formalized by Einstein (and built on the calculus of Newton and Leibniz), energy doesn't disappear from the past to populate the present. The entire event—the windup, the impact, and the home run—is a single, static geometric structure embedded in spacetime (often called a "world tube").
We perceive it sequentially because our brain is built like a phonograph needle, riding the groove note by note. But the groove where the bat hits the ball remains carved into the vinyl forever. The impact and the flight do co-exist in the full sheet music of the universe—we're just only equipped to hear one beat at a time.
Anyway, that's just my two cents. I really enjoy reading your view, John; this is practically the most fascinating topic possible to discuss!
"The impact and the flight do co-exist in the full sheet music of the universe—we're just only equipped to hear one beat at a time."
This is deterministic. That the entire course of history is laid out on that film.
Keep in mind though, that in Quantum Mechanics, quantum super position, that it is the measurement, the observation that determines whether the cat is dead or alive.
Until then, this other grand theory of reality argues there is the metaphysically statistical state in which the cat is both dead and alive.
Yet that act of observation/measurement occurs at a point in time. That it is the present at the moment it occurs. So according to this theory, the act of determination has to occur, otherwise the cat will remain eternally both dead and alive. So these events, observations, measurements, do matter. At least in this theory.
Can you sense that maybe, just maybe, they haven't quite ironed it all out yet?
This right here the single biggest rift in modern physics: the clash between General Relativity (the block universe) and Quantum Mechanics (the observer problem)!
It's worth noting, though, that quantum mechanics isn't inherently non-deterministic. Interpretations like Many-Worlds view wave-function collapse as an illusion, fitting quantum events right back into a giant, branching 4D block. I'm not sure where I stand on this issue.
But you said it: physics hasn't fully ironed it all out yet. Until someone unifies the micro and the macro, both perspectives give us a glimpse but not the full picture of the puzzle. It seems to me that we are on the cusp of a revolution in the way we regard time!
For not particular reason, Nathan's last segment reminded me of a Buddhist (or Hindu) painting I once saw. It was the Wheel of Life and depicted birth, growing up, adolescence, adult maturity, work, accomplishment, then old age, sickness and death. All then to begin anew with birth.
Tedder, I have a feeling that you're gonna love the painting I've chosen for next week's essay. It's called Vicious Circle, and it was painted by Polish artist Jacek Malczewski back in 1897. And it's almost exactly like what you've described!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacek_Malczewski#/media/File:Bledne_kolo.jpg
Nathan,
Epicycles were brilliant math and the basic fact remains. We are the center of our view of the universe. We still refer to the sun as rising in the east and setting in the west.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is this narrative flow, from past to future.
As the basis of thought, it is foundational to knowledge and all of human culture. Much as the earth appears still and the heavens swirl overhead.
The evident fact though, is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. The physical process of determination turns potential to residual. Mathematical operators are verbs.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
The event of the batter swinging at the ball and the ball flying away cannot co-exist, because it was the same energy manifesting both and it is the transition of that energy, from cause to effect, that creates this flow of time.
So energy is conserved simply because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, sound, vision, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, similar to how GR correlates distance with duration, but we don't confuse them with space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and body functions, as sequence is to thought.
The present goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past, because energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.
As it is our digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, there does tend to be this cognitive focus on the patterns, as these structured forms are what our mind rap around, yet take into account this relationship between energy and information.
In the higher ends of the spectrum, enormous amounts of information can be stored with very little energy, given effective mechanisms. Look at computers.
Yet in the lower ends of the spectrum, energy rules and models, systems, doctrines, disciplines, ideologies, etc. rule by being more dynamically powerful than the others. Diplomacy versus war.
So ask yourself, how intertwined is that symphony between frequency/time and amplitude/temperature?
"The event of the batter swinging at the ball and the ball flying away cannot co-exist, because it was the same energy manifesting both and it is the transition of that energy, from cause to effect, that creates this flow of time."
I love your way with word, John. I'll admit, this line gave me pause. But the premise here is that swing of the bat and the flight of the ball don't actually lose their existence once energy transfers. Rather, they're distinct coordinate points along a 4-dimensional continuum.
Imagine a TV broadcast of the ballgame on film:
When you look at a roll of physical film, frame 10 shows the bat striking the ball, and frame 20 shows the ball flying into the outfield. The kinetic energy transfer happens as you advance through the frames. But if you unroll the entire reel of film onto a table, frame 10 and frame 20 exist simultaneously on the table's surface.
The "flow" of energy moving from cause to effect is our internal, biological experience of traveling through the film. This is described by you perfectly.
In the 4D spacetime manifold formalized by Einstein (and built on the calculus of Newton and Leibniz), energy doesn't disappear from the past to populate the present. The entire event—the windup, the impact, and the home run—is a single, static geometric structure embedded in spacetime (often called a "world tube").
We perceive it sequentially because our brain is built like a phonograph needle, riding the groove note by note. But the groove where the bat hits the ball remains carved into the vinyl forever. The impact and the flight do co-exist in the full sheet music of the universe—we're just only equipped to hear one beat at a time.
Anyway, that's just my two cents. I really enjoy reading your view, John; this is practically the most fascinating topic possible to discuss!
Nathan,
"The impact and the flight do co-exist in the full sheet music of the universe—we're just only equipped to hear one beat at a time."
This is deterministic. That the entire course of history is laid out on that film.
Keep in mind though, that in Quantum Mechanics, quantum super position, that it is the measurement, the observation that determines whether the cat is dead or alive.
Until then, this other grand theory of reality argues there is the metaphysically statistical state in which the cat is both dead and alive.
Yet that act of observation/measurement occurs at a point in time. That it is the present at the moment it occurs. So according to this theory, the act of determination has to occur, otherwise the cat will remain eternally both dead and alive. So these events, observations, measurements, do matter. At least in this theory.
Can you sense that maybe, just maybe, they haven't quite ironed it all out yet?
This right here the single biggest rift in modern physics: the clash between General Relativity (the block universe) and Quantum Mechanics (the observer problem)!
It's worth noting, though, that quantum mechanics isn't inherently non-deterministic. Interpretations like Many-Worlds view wave-function collapse as an illusion, fitting quantum events right back into a giant, branching 4D block. I'm not sure where I stand on this issue.
But you said it: physics hasn't fully ironed it all out yet. Until someone unifies the micro and the macro, both perspectives give us a glimpse but not the full picture of the puzzle. It seems to me that we are on the cusp of a revolution in the way we regard time!
"As simple as possible, but not simpler."