"Uncle Al" wrote in message
...
| Androcles wrote:
| [snip crap]
|
| Androcles = Jämmerlichkeit
|
| --
| Uncle Al
| http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
| (Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
| http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf

Schwartz is ****ed off.
The Chinese told him "**** OFF, you DUMB ****"
They were right.
Androcles

I dont think that there is a single physicist alive today who has'nt
contemplated "spooky nonexistence".

The problem is that it dose'nt make any sense in some ways. Or that
spacetime actually becomes 3-dimensonal - this just violates
differential geometry.

Nonexistence makes no sense if Planck time is an absolute bottom. And
there's a great lack of clarity as to what nonexistence means anyway.
In math, existence is abstract, and so possibly nonexistent in a
physical sense. These ideas can really get scrambled, and alot of the
confusion is due to a poor lexicon which confuses the abstract and the
tangible.

Then, compounding the problem, I'm introducing a "relativistic"
nonexistence, or the ability for things which really exist to "appear"
nonexistent. Certainly, this must be different, in an absolute sense,
from something which really does not exist on any scale regardless of
whether it can be observed or not.

So, here are three distinict examples of nonexistence which are all
clearly different, and yet they all have the same name. That is a big
problem if you want to explain things, or even contemplate them.

Suppose you have a wave which has a wavelength higher than the Planck
frequency. It really exists in an absolute sense, but you cant observe
it (according to hypothesis). This must be different from a wave which
dosent really exist in the first place, or does it matter ? You'd
expect it to.

Well, I need an experiment, or some algebra.

dose'nt - doesn't
alot - a lot
cant - can't

Lefty said:
Suppose you have a wave which has a wavelength higher than the Planck frequency.

retard
which - that
higher - shorter
frequency - length

LEFTY wrote:
platopes wrote:
LEFTY wrote:
[snip]

There is no fundamental chunk of time,

One of us is confused; if time is continuous, then one observes
everything, always, for "less than planck time", because "less than
planck time" is contained/included in *any* amount of time, including
one exact bit of planck time. I vote for this. But you're telling me I
can't observe for "less than planck time".
Maybe observing any part of an infinite length *is* observing that
length in it's entirety.


I try to paint it this way. The whole may contain structure on all
scales, both infinitely large, and infinitely small.

Almost certainly, for without structure, what is this "whole"?

But the nature
that we experience is limited.

Our experience is certainly limited. That says little about the whole
of nature. I'm sure we don't know most of what's going on
macroscopically right here on Earth.

Time is certainly continuous.

Well, sure, maybe...

But you cannot observe time on extreme
scales.

My ability to observe a thing doesn't necessarily affect that thing.

Time appears continuous everywhere in between, as it should.

How "as it should"?

I dont think that this is a Zeno paradox.

I don't think there's any meaningful part of existence that's not
paradoxical. Apparently, "hard" stuff is made of stuff that's not
"hard". We're "here", but there's no sensible way for us to have
"arrived". Etc.


rather,
there is a fundamental chunk of existence based on our ability to
observe time,

I don't observe time when I'm sleeping...(sorry)

I don't observe you when you walk behind a wall. If I could "see"
smaller than an electron, maybe I'd see you through the wall...either
way your existence, even though it may affect me, doesn't depend on my
ability to observe you, or any knowledge of your existence on my part.


True. But our ability to observe time means basically - can you build a
clock ?

You can build a clock based on tides, the moon, the seasons, the sun,
hurricanes, stars crossing the night sky, water drippin from a bucket,
whatever you wish. All of these things make wonderful clocks.

But you cannot build a clock out of the whole universe because it will
not tick. And you cannot build a clock out of sub-quantum scale
structures because all the dynamics will appear instantaneous, i,e,
individual clock ticks will appear as one.

Why do you believe that the universe is affected by my clock-making
abilities, or lack thereof? Said abilities affect only the would-be
clockmaker, and his/her disappointed customers.
Possibly there is no "whole" wrt an infinite universe. Our logic
fails us - boo-hoo. No wait, that's mysterious and beautiful - hooray!

Everywhere between these vast scales, time is definately continuous.

Well, sure, maybe...


and this ability to observe has nothing to do with
instrumentation, and everything to do with what the universe wants us
to observe.

Existence is observed. It's the only thing the universe has decided
to show us.
Nonexistence is not observed. (Hundred-foot tall flame-throwing
babies exist conceptually as a comeback to the above statement).This
doesn't mean that whatever isn't observed doesn't exist.
Doesn't existence preclude nonexistence? Nonexistence can't have
relationships to anything, so how does one define it sensibly?
The concept of "nothing" serves only to reinforce the reality of
"something", since without the reality the concept has no meaning.


Anything can be said to exist fro zero seconds. It's trivial.

Anything observed for one second is *right out* of this category of
yours.

And anything which only exists for zero seconds does not really exist.
It's also trivial.

If I'm only considering whole seconds, three nanoseconds = zero
seconds. What's meaningful to me is "x existed for *no amount of
time*", but that's just a long, backward way of saying, "x never
existed".

So, nonexistence is constructible using time.

I would say, "There is much we don't know".

And if there were structure balow Planck scale, it would appear
nonexistent to us. That's how it would behave - as if it does not even
exist.

"...it would *appear*..." "...*as if* it did not exist." Seriously,
the same can be achieved by closing one's eyes.

If Planck is right, then :
"When the universe was created, it was already 1*10^(-44) seconds old."

Only certain humans need the universe to have had a beginning. One
thing's for sure - if it was "created" from "nothing", at some point in
time, then "nothing" is actually something containing time, and the
potential for the creation of the universe. Nice nothing ya got
there...


Planck created more problems than he solved.

No authority on that here...

Lets say that Planck is right. There is a fundamental chunk of time.
How do we get from one chunk to the next ?

"Fundamental chunk of time" has no meaning without "get from one
chunk to the next" built-in.
An analogy: motion picture film capture *happens*; the silver halide
crystals don't get to choose. We've harnessed an observed phenomenon.
Video capture *tries*; we use electronics and math to simulate film
capture, (not to simulate reality - witness, HD runs at *24fps*!!)
Maybe not the greatest analogy, but I enjoy going on about it.


If the transition is smooth,
then it might as well be considered continuous. But Planck creates a
universe which is a little like the old time movies, existence occurs
frame by frame somehow.

Not "old time"; all capture media use "frames", including our
eyes/brains.

Well, you have this fundamental chunk of time which is very, very
short. What's it made of ?

I suppose it would be made of time.

Must be continuous, but that's a paradox,
because you already have the smallest possible piece of it.

A million miles of marbles in a row. Each marble is "continuous
marble". No paradox.

Thanks for responding Lefty. I certainly don't know a damn thing, but
as you say, we're just sitting here wondering about this stuff...

What's the best thing you ever scored from the garbage? Me: the Koss
sound system currently hooked up to my computer.

p

Friends dont let friends type drunk.

The fundamental thing, however, is that time
and length become unobservable,

No... this is not true and it is a trap many fall into.


On large scales, you cant build a clock out of the whole universe. It
does not tick. You can never observe it's operation. Time becomes
unobservable.

Universalclock:
the energy is conserved if and only if the physical laws are
invariant under time translations (if their form does not depend on
time)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem


I agree with her, and so does what I've been saying. Seems like having
an absolute bottom such as Planck time creates a special "zone of
weirdness" where even causality is drawn into question.



On small scales, Planck says
Planck had an ultraviolet catastrophe...
You don't.

Planck sez:
the continuity between the static and
the dynamic fields and, with it, the complete
understanding we have enjoyed, until now, of
the fully investigated interference
phenomena - would have to be sacrificed,
both being very unhappy consequences for
today's theoreticians.
http://nobelprize.org/physics/laurea...k-lecture.html



that there is a smallest interval of time
- but gives no explanation how that could happen. Planck's view leads
to many absurd paradoxes.

You are confusing Planck's PoV with the formalism
of OM.

I quantise a wall drawing squares on it. I do not
expect to by a tiny can of paint perfectly sized to
the squares.


So, you can slide the squares around as if the wall were really
continuous, but you cannot cut the squares in half ?

Well, the way I read it was that a*10^b Planck times have elapsed since
the big bang. That would mean that time is graduated like a ruler and
the marks cant move. This dosent exactly jive with Einstein who treats
dimensions as ungraduated. I think that we could probably build on that
if we wanted to, and with considerable success.

How will we know the smallest time Left?
Or length? How will we know?

The smallest I know of is infinitesimal.
Its nonzero but the closest thing to zero.

Thanks for responding Lefty. I certainly don't know a damn thing, but
as you say, we're just sitting here wondering about this stuff...

What's the best thing you ever scored from the garbage? Me: the Koss
sound system currently hooked up to my computer.



I dunno know - just the thought of playing with dimensionality as if it
were a toy - kinda tickles my funnybone.

Dynamic dimensions:curve and move
Catch up to time and space shrinks.
It's all in relativity.

Einstein in the 1920's likened his curved space-time
to the aether. He didn't get rid of it. He brought it back!!!

LEFTY wrote:
I dont think that there is a single physicist alive today who has'nt
contemplated "spooky nonexistence".

The problem is that it dose'nt make any sense in some ways. Or that
spacetime actually becomes 3-dimensonal - this just violates
differential geometry.

Are you using the term spactime to mean a coordinate system
or an 'aether' ?



Nonexistence makes no sense if Planck time is an absolute bottom. And
there's a great lack of clarity as to what nonexistence means anyway.
In math, existence is abstract, and so possibly nonexistent in a
physical sense. These ideas can really get scrambled, and alot of the
confusion is due to a poor lexicon which confuses the abstract and the
tangible.

Then, compounding the problem, I'm introducing a "relativistic"
nonexistence, or the ability for things which really exist to "appear"
nonexistent. Certainly, this must be different, in an absolute sense,
from something which really does not exist on any scale regardless of
whether it can be observed or not.

So, here are three distinict examples of nonexistence which are all
clearly different, and yet they all have the same name. That is a big
problem if you want to explain things, or even contemplate them.

Suppose you have a wave which has a wavelength higher than the Planck
frequency. It really exists in an absolute sense, but you cant observe
it (according to hypothesis). This must be different from a wave which
dosent really exist in the first place, or does it matter ? You'd
expect it to.

Things that pop in and out of exstiance are called 'magic'.


Well, I need an experiment, or some algebra.

http://web.mit.edu/8.02t/www/802TEAL3D/teal_tour.htm

Sue...