Investigating the structure of time

In a new paper called "Time crystals from minimum time uncertainty", physicists from several universities have proposed that the shortest physically meaningful length of time may actually be several orders of magnitude longer than the Planck time, which is believed to be the smallest physically meaningful interval of time, approximately 10-43 seconds.
In addition, the physicists have demonstrated that the existence of such a minimum time alters the basic equations of quantum mechanics, and as quantum mechanics describes all physical systems at a very small scale, this would change the description of all quantum mechanical systems.

http://phys.org/news/2016-02-physicists-implications-quantum-mechanics-philosophy.html

 

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Oh, BRAVO, Plazma Inferno!

This is exactly the kind of revision physics has needed for a very long TIME (pun intended). It's so good all by itself, I've nothing to add.

 

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To quote part of the OPs link:
"On a more philosophical level, the argument that time is discrete suggests that our perception of time as something that is continuously flowing is just an illusion. "The physical universe is really like a movie/motion picture, in which a series of still images shown on a screen creates the illusion of moving images," Faizal said. "Thus, if this view is taken seriously, then our conscious precipitation of physical reality based on continuous motion becomes an illusion produced by a discrete underlying mathematical structure."

As I understand it they are saying that the least observable change takes longer by orders of magnitude than the Planck time. This again supports the idea that time does not exist, independ of changes. It is change that is real and it occures (as far as being observable) in discret steps.

 

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Are you saying that the Planck length cannot be represented as light travel time?

 

Not sure about light, but about things with mass, I understand them to be saying they make discrete jumps to move, as far as any observation can tell. I.e. that in principle motion is discrete as only what can in principle be observed is real.What is not inprinciple observable, is open to philosophical speculation.

 

You cannot explain this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift_quantization

without a mechanism by which the SHIFT of redshifted light from cosmologically distant galaxies can get quantized. This happens in intergalactic space, where there aren't enough atoms to explain whatever quantization is happening.

An investigation of the quantization (if any) of time on a scale much finer than that of bulk energy transfer (the speed of light) will be necessary to account for this.

 

I tend to accept the point of view that light from distant stars, has been "stretched" as it travels by the expansion of the universe, for a longer time related to it greater trip duration. I.e. has nothing to do with the presence or absence of atoms and their quantized motion steps the paper speaks of. Also I don't think time is a real, and observable, but a convenient concept, so don't follow your point in last sentence.

 

I think the concept of time exists in our perception only. In reality it may not exist.

 

You mean that the proposal cannot explain why there is no evidence of this quantization in our best galaxy surveys?

 

Even if that were true, why would the stretching causing a quantization of the redshifts?

http://www.space.com/26279-universe-expansion-measurement-quasars-boss.html

"If we looked back to the universe when it was less than a quarter of its present age, we'd see that a pair of galaxies separated by a million light-years would be drifting apart at a velocity of 68 kilometers a second as the universe expands," Font-Ribera said in an accompanying press release.

"The uncertainty is plus or minus only a kilometer and a half per second."

- See more at: http://www.space.com/26279-universe-expansion-measurement-quasars-boss.html#sthash.eK1aJn5s.dpuf

68 km/ sec ±1 km/sec is much, much less than 2.997925 x 10^5 km/sec. The present day universe expansion WHERE THE QUANTIZED REDSHIFTED LIGHT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT HAS BEEN PROPAGATING has been measured, and is not FTL.

 

I see that the Doppler redshift quantizations found in spiral galaxies and elsewhere correspond to (velocity) breaks at 1/2, 1/3, or 1/6 of the magic value of 72 km/sec. More recently, our own Milky Way galaxy has been verified to be subject to the same parametric quantization, still unexplained in a satisfactory manner.

I see that the values are close (68 vs 72 km/s), but I never associated or equivocated the universe expansion with these numbers. Do you have a reference that explains this correspondence, BillyT?

 

It doesn't.

This supposed quantization appears to be an artefact; it does not appear in large, carefully gathered samples.

To talk like this is a real thing is almost like talking of phlogiston.

So? Who cares about these two numbers? Why should we compare them? Just because you have a fantasy does not mean that there is any relationship between these two numbers at all.

 

I don't have time to re-read article, but where did you get idea that red shifts are quantized? As I recall, they spoke of objects with mass moving in tiny steps not light.

 

I provided a Wikipedia link in my post #6, but this has been observed for decades without a plausible explanation.

 

You seem not to have read to the end of that particular article, where it is revealed that, while observed in a few early samples, the quantization does not appear in modern large and comprehensive samples.

 

Here is the first sentence of that link:
"Redshift quantization is the hypothesis that the redshifts of cosmologically distant objects (in particular galaxies) tend to cluster around multiples of some particular value. "

It is a hypothese, not an observarion. Thus needs to be demonstrated, not explained.
I suspect that members of local groups have about the same red shift. Perhaps their orbital mechanics gives a certain regular difference - much like line radiation from the sun's planet would have, but changing on a much shorter time scale than mutually orbiting stars.

 

No. It's not just a "hypothesis". And it's not just one observation. The first place it was noticed was the Coma cluster over 20 years ago, but since then, the observation of the quantization of redshifts has been corroborated EVERYWHERE, galaxies and quasars alike.

 

Why would you write such a transparent lie? It has not been corroborated everywhere, as we can read in the link that you provided.

 

But you inspired me to add this helpful suggestion to the talk page of the cited Wikipedia article:

An Observation is not the same as a Hypothesis
And this article, from the first line, does not seem to understand the difference.

In the scientific method, observation precedes making a hypothesis to explain those observations, usually followed by corroborating tests to validate (accept or reject) them. No hypothesis has been put forward by anyone as a POSSIBLE EXPLANATION of the quantization of redshifts (which has been scientifically validated).

This is some really basic science vocabulary this article seems to be lacking, and not the sort of thing you expect to find in an encyclopedia.Danshawen (talk) 11:56, 4 February 2016 (UTC)danshawen

Part of the problem no one takes this effect seriously may be pablum like THIS:

http://creation.com/our-galaxy-is-the-centre-of-the-universe-quantized-redshifts-show

Which is the OPPOSITE of science, but many religious people who fancy themselves scientists are eager to find new ways to set the clock back to the days of Ptolemy.

So evidently I did not provide a reliable link to the quantization of redshifts observed in quasars. Here is one:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0506366

If you notice that all of your observations of redshift data seem to be falling into quantized STEPS, THAT IS AN OBSERVATION, NOT A HYPOTHESIS.

 

At any rate, I found your reference about stretching vs redshift quantization, BillyT.

http://www.setterfield.org/redshift.htm

This is a GENESIS SCIENCE RESEARCH website, another CREATION SCIENCE, or <id> crock.

Don't believe a single word you read there is "science".