Scientists suggest spacetime has no time dimension Article: Amrit Sorli, Davide Fiscaletti, and Dusan Klinar. “Replacing time with numerical order of material change resolves Zeno problems of motion.” Physics Essays, 24, 1 (2011). DOI: 10.4006/1.3525416
Wow, even for PhysOrg that's pretty poor quality reporting, seeing as Amrit is a wacko. Anyone who has seen him post on PhysForums will know he's 3 sandwiches short of a picnic in terms of his work. His 'papers' (and I use that in the vaguest possible meaning of the word!!) are available on the crank version of ArXiv, ViXra.org. At least one of his 'papers' is just 2 pages long, including title, abstract and what little references he gives. 2 pages? I'd link to it but the vixra search engine isn't working for me for some reason. The fact the article refers to him as a 'scientist' is doing a disservice to everyone who can legitimately call themselves a scientist. There's already plenty of discussion online as to whether Physics Essays is a crank journal (or at the very least a terrible one) and if Amrit has got a 'paper' there then I guess that is the final nail in that particular coffin.
Well AN, I'm glad to see you say that and thanks for posting early. I read the OP and the links and started watch hoping someone would weigh in. I'm all for disregarding the thought that there is such a move afoot.
Where did I say that? I said that Amrit's work is exceedingly poorly written and its an extreme stretch to call him anything close to scientist. Asking questions about the nature of the 'fabric' of space-time, even questioning whether viewing it anything like GR does, are perfectly valid. I've seen seminars by people questioning things like "Is quantum field theory really the path to understanding the subatomic?", I'm not averse to new ideas. What I am averse to is the reporting of poorly written, ill explained, partly incoherent nonsense in a questionable journal as if it is just as credible as anything else. Here is a link to one of his 'papers'. In the abstract it makes bold claims about introducing "density/curvature of quantum space". Tell me, do you think it does? Do you think it provides "shows that mass diminished density of timeless quantum space and this change generates gravitational motion", as it claims in the conclusions? Take a look at the PhysOrg discussion under the article, where Amrit weighs in. He fails to provide coherent justification for his claims and repeats his obsession with the \(x^{4} = ict\) change of variables sometimes used in physics. He doesn't like the non-Euclidean nature of relativity, but he doesn't understand it and he ignores it's more experimentally valid than the Euclidean point of view. Some of his poor communication can be put down to English not being his first language but that only goes so far. He's been repeating the same paragraph or so of views for the half decade I've seen him around. Simply because something is claimed in the abstract and repeated in the conclusions of something typed up in the format typically used by legit papers doesn't mean it is legit. A slightly ironic thing in another of his documents is the final reference. He misquotes the reference of the paper as "Buhusi C.V., Meck W.H., What makes us thick?". Yes, what does make him thick.....
TWO pages? Bah. Try one page. http://vixra.org/abs/0910.0014 ( I cannot be responsible for your blood pressure if you click on this link ) I found three examples of two pages: http://vixra.org/abs/0910.0018 http://vixra.org/abs/0910.0041 http://vixra.org/abs/1005.0073 http://vixra.org/author/Amrit_S_Sorli http://vixra.org/author/Amrit_Sorli http://vixra.org/author/Amrit_Srecko_Sorli Finally, here is the abstract of the Buhusi and Meck paper which was incorrectly cited (twice in the same paper, and the extensive quote that they take doesn't actually connect with what they are saying....) http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v6/n10/full/nrn1764.html
It is certainly presumptuous for me to reply in a discussion between real scientists and mathematicians, but I will anyway. It looks like a shotgun approach to go on the record about many "less that sound" theories so that should anything begin to gain stature the author can point to his vixra link and show how prophetic he was.
I don't have papers published in any of the above "crank" or "non-crank" e-Print archives, or journal that you are referring to as a crank journal. However, this I know. That which is currently preferred, or is considered "first” as opposed to that which is not preferred and is considered "last", and is available to all, will eventually succumb to the true proverb: That which is considered "first" will be "last", and eventually over time, that which is considered "last" will be "first"!!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Here is a simple experiment that might be useful to the discussion. This is something anyone can do and is based on what is called "motion blur" within photography. If the motion within a photo, is faster than the shutter speed or rate at which the film is expose, the motion in the photo will become blurred. If the shutter speed is correct the same motion will be clear. For the same motion or change of state, and the exact same spatial coordinate system in space, two different shutter speeds (function of time) will create two very different degrees of indeterminancies in position (blur). In the first pictures below, the shutter speed does not allow enough time (too slow) to clearly capture the action. The potential in time between the actual action and the shutter speeds shows up in the photo as indeterminancy in distance; motion or distance blur. We don't know exactly the sequence of motion due to the blur. In the second photo, the shutter speed is fast enough so there is no time difference or potential between the shutter and the action. We lose that indeterminacy in space allowing us to accurately tell the sequence of events. That tells me, the idea of getting rid of time can work, but it will only be valid within the special case of something loosely analogous to the perfect shutter speed. The experiment demonstrates that if there is a time potential, that we are not fully away of, such as uncertainty principle, that timeless assumption can create problems. It would be like using the first photo to guess the second photo. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Individual journals or archives might go in and out of favour but there will always be such places which allow only a small fraction of submitted work to be published/archived. It is essential to the spread of scientific knowledge within the research community and it is something ArXiv has already come up against. Originally all you needed was an email address and you could put papers on ArXiv but they found too many nuts were putting crap on there and it hindered the reason ArXiv exists, to help spread relevant information within the research community. If for every relevant paper you have to look through 99 crap ones then there is no point in having the website, hence their requirement someone vouches for you or you have a university email address now. If every journal opened their doors to any idiot with Microsoft Word they would no longer make any money because they would be swamped with nonsense, academics wouldn't want to wade through the crap and thus universities would cancel their subscriptions. You obviously haven't experienced this but in the research community people are expected to do research and if they have to spend 100 times longer looking through huge journals which haven't been filtered for validity for perhaps 1 good paper out of 100 then they won't be doing as much research. Research is streamlined by having various filters on content between authors and readers. It's the same principle as email spam filtering. Sure, you could wade through all the spam email you get sent or you could just get it filtered so only the ones relevant to you and which are worth reading get through. Having an email account would be pointless if you had to spend 2 hours looking through 1000 spam emails for the one email someone sent you, just as having a journal filled with crap is pointless. As such as long as there is a research community there will be peer reviewing publishing entities which filter content. Those entities which don't filter content, like crank journals or vanity publishing groups, aren't read by the research community because the signal to noise ratio is too small. As such no matter how much you dream of your work being published without you having to pay for it unless you write something of worth it won't be published anywhere a researcher will give it any attention. To use your "the last shall be first" quote, at the moment you're last and no matter how much you wish it to be otherwise you won't be first without completely altering your attitude, actually learning some physics and becoming less delusional about your accomplishments (not that you have any).
For once, you kinda have a valid point in the above. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! However, viXra.org, has an opposing view that also makes sense to me. They state: Why viXra? A few of the cases where people have been blocked from submitting to the arXiv have been detailed on the Archive Freedom website, but as time has gone by it has become clear that Cornell have no plans to bow to pressure and change their policies. Some of us now feel that the time has come to start an alternative archive which will be open to the whole scientific community. That is why viXra has been created. viXra will be open to anybody for both reading and submitting articles. We will not prevent anybody from submitting and will only reject articles in extreme cases of abuse, e.g. where the work may be vulgar, libellous, plagiarism or dangerously misleading. It is inevitable that viXra will therefore contain e-prints that many scientists will consider clearly wrong and unscientific. However, it will also be a repository for new ideas that the scientific establishment is not currently willing to consider. Other perfectly conventional e-prints will be found here simply because the authors were not able to find a suitable endorser for the arXiv or because they prefer a more open system. It is our belief that anybody who considers themselves to have done scientific work should have the right to place it in an archive in order to communicate the idea to a wide public. They should also be allowed to stake their claim of priority in case the idea is recognised as important in the future. Many scientists argue that if arXiv.org had such an open policy then it would be filled with unscientific papers that waste peoples time. There are problems with that argument. Firstly there are already a high number of submissions that do get into the archive which many people consider to be rubbish, but they don't agree on which ones they are. If you removed them all, the arXiv would be left with only safe papers of very limited interest. Instead of complaining about the papers they don't like, researchers need to find other ways of selecting the papers of interest to them. arXiv.org could help by providing technology to help people filter the article lists they browse. It is also often said that the arXiv.org exclusion policies does not matter because if an amateur scientist were to make a great discovery, it would certainly be noticed and recognised. There are two reasons why this argument is wrong and unhelpful. Firstly, many amateur scientists are just trying to do ordinary science. They do not have to make the next great paradigm shift in science before their work can be useful. Secondly, the best new ideas do not follow from conventional research and it may take several years before their importance can be appreciated. If such a discovery cannot be put in a permanent archive it will be overlooked to the detriment of both the author and the scientific community. Another argument is that anybody can submit their work to a journal where it will get an impartial review. The truth is that most journals are now more concerned with the commercial value their impact factor than with the advance of science. Papers submitted by anyone without a good affiliation to a research institution find it very difficult to publish. Their work is often returned with an unhelpful note saying that it will not be passed on for review because it does not meet the criteria of the journal.
The origins of Vixra are related to what I said in my last post. In order for a research resource to be useful to the academic community it must has a high signal to noise ratio. Too much nonsense makes it difficult or even impossible to use efficiently. Some people abused that, either deliberately with papers titled something like "Dare the establishment face my disproof of general relativity!" (yes, someone actually put a paper like that on ArXiv, goes by the name of truth2k on PhysForums) or by putting up what they thought was valid but which was nonsense. You believe your work to be valid but it is riddled with huge errors, hence any work you might wish to put on ArXiv would only increase the noise levels. Josephson, who has a Nobel Prize, has done similar things and his banning from ArXiv (other than the general physics subsection) is what partly started vixra. Anyone familiar with QFT and GR who has read his vixra 'paper' about uniting string theory and parapsychology will have seen for themselves why his papers aren't allowed in the theoretical physics section of ArXiv. It is possible to get into the research community from your position. You have no published work and no doctorate so you would need to apply for a PhD position at a university. Someone in his 50s joined the department I was in the year I finished, wanting to do a theoretical physics PhD, so it is not unheard of. From there you can work your way up and through research academia. If you're willing to plow your own money into vanity publishing then funding yourself for a 3 year PhD might not be out of the question. That'd also give you the freedom to decide on your research topic a lot more, though a supervisor would still have to sign off on it. The routes are there if you can demonstrate the ability. Unfortunately I don't think you're capable of that, not without completely altering your general attitude to learning and science.
Amrit is right about time. Try to look past all the ad-hominem attacks and think about what a clock actually measures. If you can, find a mechanical clock and open up the back. You don't see "time flowing", you see cogs and sprockets moving. What the clock is actually doing is clocking up the regular motion, or change, and giving you a cumulative readout that you call "the time". You can't move through this cumulative measure of motion through space. The time dimension is a dimension of measure, not one that offers freedom of motion. Also see A World Without Time: the forgotten legacy of Godel and Einstein. Einstein thought this way too, but not until 1949.
Other point scoring opportunities can be read about here. Farsight, if you honestly want people to take your thoughts seriously, you should do everything in your power to not score any points on that list.
How can timespace not have time as a dimension? For A.N.: A pressis requirement would be a good compromise. You then would not have to wade through endless end matter, find good papers and still enjoy railing against cracked pots. I am not a scientist yet I wonder about main stream physics. Philosophically you can not have true constants in a relative universe. Light can not exist in a pure vacuum because a pure vacuum, like pure matter, is not relative. It seems to me that all our pots are cracked.
Maybe time is just a function of dimension that we can measure. I wonder if it is erroniously considered a dimension as without us to measure it it would perhaps become a relative irrelevance. Can an otherwise irrelavent "dimension" really be a key component in the structure of space?
Ultra, There is nothing in our universe that is not time dependant. But I agree that our cognacent understanding of it says more about us than it does about time. Then too, everything there is, is a function of everything else, but we would need Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss to explain it all. Thanks for the input.
