Experiments Show Gravity Is Not an Emergent Phenomenon

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

I like to say it with Carl Sagan, who said (something like this) "as the only currently known being that can try to understand the universe it is our duty to find out as much about it as we can."
I like that approach.

Tom Ligon
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Post by Tom Ligon »

tomclarke,

I'll definitely buy in that time as a dimension is a creation of human minds, and that our notion of spacetime is a distortion of the derivation of the idea.

The first thing Einstein told us about time is that it is a local phenomenon. By process of reasoning that is more than a little circular, time aboard a moving object relative to a stationary reference is measured by using light beams parallel to the path of the moving object. With a bit of work that gives us time passing slower on the moving object. Well, yeah, but then how does that then say if you can plot time versus distance, that you have somehow fiddled with a dimension of time? People can work the math and convince themselves that FTL travel would make them go back in time, while the most rudimentary examination of the problem says that while "time" might go backwards (or more appropriately, sideways) on the moving object, it just marches on back at the stationary observer, and when the object gets back to the origin it will have moved forward in the stationary observer's frame.

What actually exists macroscopically is not time, but change. Clocks measure change. Change comes from all the little things down to quantum mechanics that add up to what we call time marching on. So yes, time is emergent from what really happens. It is not a dimension, not a vector, it is a scalar. One way only. And I've seen a quantum view of time that supports this notion, probably from Dr. Cramer.

And my motto is Heinlein's famous "Specialization is for insects."

Betruger
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Post by Betruger »

djolds1 wrote:
Betruger wrote:IMHO, intelligence enhancers (ie "transhumanist" type) can't come soon enough. We are struggling too hard with just what we have on our scientific plate already. And nowadays that's mostly within each field and sub/sub-sub fields. There's all the interdisciplinary wisdom IMHO mostly yet to be reaped in earnest.
Plenty of nootropics available today as off-label uses of other pharmaceuticals. Get the scripts, or roll the dice with drug laws.

And wrt specialization, I think its the explosion of specialization that is both featherbedding and delusional. Its the profound simplicities that underlie physical and human reality, not the illusory and emergent complexities.
I'm saying much more significant performance than just today's nootropics. I don't remember any of them allowing you to know a few whole disciplines as deep and wide as e.g. some of neuroscience's major branches, or all of them.

tomclarke
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Post by tomclarke »

Tom Ligon wrote:tomclarke,

I'll definitely buy in that time as a dimension is a creation of human minds, and that our notion of spacetime is a distortion of the derivation of the idea.

The first thing Einstein told us about time is that it is a local phenomenon. By process of reasoning that is more than a little circular, time aboard a moving object relative to a stationary reference is measured by using light beams parallel to the path of the moving object. With a bit of work that gives us time passing slower on the moving object. Well, yeah, but then how does that then say if you can plot time versus distance, that you have somehow fiddled with a dimension of time? People can work the math and convince themselves that FTL travel would make them go back in time, while the most rudimentary examination of the problem says that while "time" might go backwards (or more appropriately, sideways) on the moving object, it just marches on back at the stationary observer, and when the object gets back to the origin it will have moved forward in the stationary observer's frame.

What actually exists macroscopically is not time, but change. Clocks measure change. Change comes from all the little things down to quantum mechanics that add up to what we call time marching on. So yes, time is emergent from what really happens. It is not a dimension, not a vector, it is a scalar. One way only. And I've seen a quantum view of time that supports this notion, probably from Dr. Cramer.

And my motto is Heinlein's famous "Specialization is for insects."
Time, and causality, is one of the really fascinating fundamental issues.

The fact that we experience one-way causality, the arrow of time, links with pretty well everything. Assymetry is always a question. Why? And the answer to that why must encompass a lot of other stuff.

happyjack27
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Post by happyjack27 »

"A philosopher today must feel like a god become man." Don't remember who this quote is from, I think it was Nietzsche, thou. Point being that true wisdom makes more aware of our stance before the world and less fanciful in our beliefs.

LCARS_24
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Post by LCARS_24 »


djolds1
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Post by djolds1 »

Tom Ligon wrote:I'll definitely buy in that time as a dimension is a creation of human minds, and that our notion of spacetime is a distortion of the derivation of the idea.
Down that road I think lies solipsism. Once we admit we're abandoning plain observation of reality, we might as well confess we're giving up on science and refusing to play any more.
Tom Ligon wrote:What actually exists macroscopically is not time, but change. Clocks measure change. Change comes from all the little things down to quantum mechanics that add up to what we call time marching on. So yes, time is emergent from what really happens. It is not a dimension, not a vector, it is a scalar. One way only. And I've seen a quantum view of time that supports this notion, probably from Dr. Cramer.
Disagree. IMO, giving up on the arrow of time is the embrace of metaphysics.
Betruger wrote:
djolds1 wrote:Plenty of nootropics available today as off-label uses of other pharmaceuticals. Get the scripts, or roll the dice with drug laws.
I'm saying much more significant performance than just today's nootropics. I don't remember any of them allowing you to know a few whole disciplines as deep and wide as e.g. some of neuroscience's major branches, or all of them.
Some approaches and techniques are reputed to bypass or enhance the effect of the 10,000 hour limit on mastery - Supermemo, deliberate practice, etc.
Vae Victis

djolds1
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Post by djolds1 »

LCARS_24 wrote:These two papers and others propose a different approach:

http://www.intalek.com/Index/Projects/R ... -final.pdf

http://www.calphysics.org/articles/gravity_arxiv.pdf
Or quanta are an illusory emergent phenomenon, each quanta being as "real" as the nodes in a string whipped up to the fourth harmonic.

Tho the Haisch approach does have some aesthetic appeal for its mind-numbingly simple take on inertia, yes.
Vae Victis

Tom Ligon
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Post by Tom Ligon »

djolds1,

Solipsism: I drink, therefore I am. No, wait, that's Monte Python's version, not Descartes. Not sure I follow. I tend to be an empiricist who tends to believe his senses, and has a lot of trouble abandoning horse-sense for the abstract ... hardly solipsism. And I accept a one-way arrow of time, as opposed to freedom to move either way as implied by a dimension of time.

I was actually pretty pleased with myself when one day Dr. Bussard leaned back in his chair and said something very similar about time, validating my view. In what appeared to be a conceptual ephipany for him, as a physicist, he said that time is what we measure with clocks. He was so used to thinking of it as a dimension, he had stopped thinking of it in the terms a clockmaker uses. To a clockmaker, there is nothing profound at all about this statement. To a physicist, it reduces time from some universal dimension in spacetime back to a useful measurement made with a gadget that operates on physical change.

I have some quibbles with the Laws of Thermodynamics, as well, but not with the notion that things tend to run down ... entropy increases. If time has any arrow, it is that it is all downhill from here. Time can't go uphill. Even the poets understand "water under the bridge."

"Downhill" ... that implies gravity. Some of our clocks use pendulums. Some use gravity to trickle sand or water thru an orifice. We tell time using orbits. Until we designed electronic and atomic clocks, one might have suggested time is emergent from gravity!

You can reverse change locally. You cannot wind the Universe back to an earlier setting. Time is local. This is not to say that the phenomena underlying the operation of our clocks are not universal, but time as a dimension comparable to distance is a human concept that needs to be used with care.

The quibble with thermodynamics is the oxymoron that things tend to a state of increased disorder. True enough for gas molecules, but this "law" was arrived at by intelligent beings that arose from the primoidial slime via self-ordering of chemicals over 4 billion years or so, on a layered planet that condensed from disordered gas, in a fairly well-ordered solar system orbiting a fairly well-ordered galaxy. If the lowest energy state requires order, then order will arise. But, barring energy input to buck the trend, you can generally expect things to run down. The interesting thing here is that gravity tends to impose order.
Last edited by Tom Ligon on Sat Sep 03, 2011 2:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

EricF
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Post by EricF »

This guy proposes that gravity and the strong force are essentially effects caused by electromagnetic and electrostatic forces.

http://www.dipole.se/

Torulf2
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Post by Torulf2 »

Things runs down in the universe at large. The molecular disorder increase in the intergalactic space but can decrease local, in open system as earth. The second law makes the energy flow and from that flow the life feeds. Self organisation is a result from the second law not against it.
http://www.intothecool.com/index.php

djolds1
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Post by djolds1 »

Tom Ligon wrote:djolds1,

Solipsism: I drink, therefore I am. No, wait, that's Monte Python's version, not Descartes. Not sure I follow. I tend to be an empiricist who tends to believe his senses, and has a lot of trouble abandoning horse-sense for the abstract ... hardly solipsism. And I accept a one-way arrow of time, as opposed to freedom to move either way as implied by a dimension of time.
Then I badly misinterpreted your meaning, as we seem to be in violent agreement.
Tom Ligon wrote:I was actually pretty pleased with myself when one day Dr. Bussard leaned back in his chair and said something very similar about time, validating my view. In what appeared to be a conceptual ephipany for him, as a physicist, he said that time is what we measure with clocks. He was so used to thinking of it as a dimension, he had stopped thinking of it in the terms a clockmaker uses. To a clockmaker, there is nothing profound at all about this statement. To a physicist, it reduces time from some universal dimension in spacetime back to a useful measurement made with a gadget that operates on physical change.
That would tickle me as well. I have no issue with qualifying time as a "dimension" (as a mathematically imaginary quantity) - it is a real and observed aspect of experience and observed physical processes. Trying to define a "duh" obvious quality out of existence strikes me as insane. The Age of Science transition from Aristotle to Kepler/Galileo/Newton involved the recognition of new simplicities (the stars are physical objects in motion, not dots painted on metaphysical glass epicycles in the heavens), but not the rejection of basic and consistent quantities and qualities that have stood up"over time."

That's one reason I like the Williams Thermodynamic approach - positing mass as an imaginary mathematical quantity ("dimension") on the same order as time feels "right" at a very simple yet profound level. By contrast, the more baroque models seem to be desperately flailing about. Parsimony is not proof of course, but it is the aesthetic necessity of any hypothesis become theory with scope.
Tom Ligon wrote:I have some quibbles with the Laws of Thermodynamics, as well, but not with the notion that things tend to run down ... entropy increases. If time has any arrow, it is that it is all downhill from here. Time can't go uphill. Even the poets understand "water under the bridge."
Concur.
Tom Ligon wrote:You can reverse change locally. You cannot wind the Universe back to an earlier setting. Time is local. This is not to say that the phenomena underlying the operation of our clocks are not universal, but time as a dimension comparable to distance is a human concept that needs to be used with care.
Relativity is well supported. Time is of course local, but whatever its local rate, it retains a single direction.
Tom Ligon wrote:The quibble with thermodynamics is the oxymoron that things tend to a state of increased disorder. True enough for gas molecules, but this "law" was arrived at by intelligent beings that arose from the primordial slime via self-ordering of chemicals over 4 billion years or so, on a layered planet that condensed from disordered gas, in a fairly well-ordered solar system orbiting a fairly well-ordered galaxy. If the lowest energy state requires order, then order will arise. But, barring energy input to buck the trend, you can generally expect things to run down. The interesting thing here is that gravity tends to impose order.
Read up on systems theory, and specifically the works of Conway-Morris and Prigione. The same basic structures emerge again, and again, and again. The eye is probably the most famous biological example, but basin-state "attractors" of structure abound in systems theory. The complex is inherent in the simple. Consider that the Human Genome Project found only 25000 genes - 20 to 25% of the minimum expected c.1990. The formation of the human brain is controlled by only 3000 genes - that's a very low number of "instructions" for something so complex. Ergo a profound simplicity underlies it.
Vae Victis

choff
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Post by choff »

My metaphysical view is that the universe, including even the state of total oblivion, cannot exist without at least one concious observer, if only to imagine it as a concept. Yin and Yang can't have one without the other, but conciousness requires the existence of time and language. Language requires another concious observer to communicate knowledge of the existence of the universe with. In essence, in the beginning was the word and the word was god and the word was with god.

Remember that before the universe there were absolutely no rules about how it would order itself, so nothing could stop a boltzmann brain from self arising at the same time(Yin and Yang again).
CHoff

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

Tom Ligon wrote: I was actually pretty pleased with myself when one day Dr. Bussard leaned back in his chair and said something very similar about time, validating my view. In what appeared to be a conceptual ephipany for him, as a physicist, he said that time is what we measure with clocks. He was so used to thinking of it as a dimension, he had stopped thinking of it in the terms a clockmaker uses. To a clockmaker, there is nothing profound at all about this statement. To a physicist, it reduces time from some universal dimension in spacetime back to a useful measurement made with a gadget that operates on physical change.
Yes, QM suggests wavefunctions collapse in a non-reversible way, which is why we see time moving that way.

Imagine for a moment you have created a box in which the 2L behaves opposite of usual. Guess what, your box is a localized time reversal machine!

I think when QM and relativity are united, it will become clear that treating time as a dimension was just a useful approximation, like Newtonian physics.
n*kBolt*Te = B**2/(2*mu0) and B^.25 loss scaling? Or not so much? Hopefully we'll know soon...

happyjack27
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Post by happyjack27 »

applying the second law to the universe and deducing heat death amount to making to completely unsupported assumptions:

1. the universe is finite
2. the universe is bounded

not to mention so many other things, like completely neglecting nonlinear phenomena such as, oh, i don't know, gravity. so let's add another totally unsupported assumption:

3. the universe contains only negative feedback

you can see we're already ventured far into the ridiculous and absurd.

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