Reality - Real Time Passage

Suppose, hypothetically speaking, you were to exist one moment, then not exist another moment, then exist once more, would you not call the period that you existed before a moment in time that took place before the unexplainable gap where you briefly ceased to exist? Or would you say that you existed for two moments/ two lifetimes?

 

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Neither. I'd say I existed for two distinct periods but not in between. Unless the periods of existence were instantaneous or very nearly so, in which case I suppose I might call them moments.

My question is what on Earth you mean by calling a 90 year period a "moment". What do you intend this to signify that describing it as an "interval" or "period" would not?

By the way, I don't know whether you really want to argue for discontinuities in the existence of macroscopic objects, but if you do you'll need to provide evidence.

 

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A moment can be defined as any arbitrary length of time. It need not be instantaneous because then you would need to define what instantaneous means, Plank time? Instantaneous might mean something else in the mind of another.

I don't wish to.

 

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PAUL DAVIES: A number of philosophers over the years have arrived at the same conclusion [as GR physicists] by examining what we normally mean by the passage of time. They argue that the notion is internally inconsistent. The concept of flux, after all, refers to motion. It makes sense to talk about the movement of a physical object, such as an arrow through space, by gauging how its location varies with time. But what meaning can be attached to the movement of time itself? Relative to what does it move? Whereas other types of motion relate one physical process to another, the putative flow of time relates time to itself. Posing the simple question “How fast does time pass?” exposes the absurdity of the very idea. The trivial answer “One second per second” tells us nothing at all. --Scientific American; sept 2002 issue

"Time" is the overall framework -- the arrangement or organization of events, which in the everyday life are distinguished into categories like past, present, future. When philosophers and cosmological-scale physicists refer to time being an illusion, they're usually referring to the supposed "flow" rather than time itself (or they desire to discard that traditional concept for something more useful / pertinent to their work). Conclusions drawn from quantum physics on the other hand, tend to regard the flow (and its asymmetrical direction) as an emergent appearance, effect, etc applicable to only large things (the macroscopic world).

Whether the special status granted to the "present" (only THIS moment / state of the world exists) is legitimate or not depends upon the context. Certainly "now" is more real in conscious experience than past/future events stored in memory or anticipated by thought. But then what is intersubjectively verifiable in our perceptions / sensations is what "real" was abstracted from to begin with. Which is to say, the classification wasn't derived from the normally hidden circumstances that theoretical physics deals with and that speculative philosophy concerned itself with for centuries prior. [The reality presented by perception was denigrated as illusion thousands of years ago by Greek, Indian, etc thinkers; what recently fell out of Einstein and microphysical research is hardly a new flip-flop concerning the original usage of "real"] Average folk who take their brain-produced manifestations and native understandings to be what is "real" can still hold on to that for reasons aforementioned. After all, it's still the world of appearances which we find ourselves directly / immediately living in -- not the GR and QM physics stratums yielded from extended inferences and experiments.

PAUL DAVIES: In daily life we divide time into three parts: past, present and future. The grammatical structure of language revolves around this fundamental distinction. Reality is associated with the present moment. The past we think of as having slipped out of existence, whereas the future is even more shadowy, its details still unformed. In this simple picture, the “now” of our conscious awareness glides steadily onward, transforming events that were once in the unformed future into the concrete but fleeting reality of the present, and thence relegating them to the fixed past.

Obvious though this commonsense description may seem, it is seriously at odds with modern physics. Albert Einstein famously expressed this point when he wrote to a friend, “The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones.” Einstein’s startling conclusion stems directly from his special theory of relativity, which denies any absolute, universal significance to the present moment. According to the theory, simultaneity is relative. Two events that occur at the same moment if observed from one reference frame may occur at different moments if viewed from another.

[...] The most straightforward conclusion is that both past and future are fixed. For this reason, physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety — a timescape, analogous to a landscape — with all past and future events located there together. It is a notion sometimes referred to as block time. Completely absent from this description of nature is anything that singles out a privileged special moment as the present or any process that would systematically turn future events into present, then past, events. In short, the time of the physicist does not pass or flow. --SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN; SEPTEMBER 2002

TIM FOLGER: “We never really see time,” he [Carlo Rovelli] says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.

[...] Rovelli, the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right. Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. “We never really see time,” he says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.

“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”

The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. By “big things,” Rovelli means anything that exists much above the mysterious Planck scale. As of now there is no physical theory that completely describes what the universe is like below the Planck scale. One possibility is that if physicists ever manage to unify quantum theory and general relativity, space and time will be described by some modified version of quantum mechanics. In such a theory, space and time would no longer be smooth and continuous. Rather, they would consist of discrete fragments—quanta, in the argot of physics—just as light is composed of individual bundles of energy called photons. These would be the building blocks of space and time. It’s not easy to imagine space and time being made of something else. Where would the components of space and time exist, if not in space and time?

As Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. “Space and time in some sense melt in this picture,” says Rovelli. “There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space.” http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time

CARINNE PIEKEMA: One of the discrepancies between the classical world and the quantum world is how our world is governed by the passage of time, which only flows in one direction, from the past to the future. When watching videos in the olden days, if you accidentally hit rewind instead of fast forward, it would only take a second to realize your mistake. A barista walking backwards only to see the coffee flowing up from a cup into his pot; or an animal being unborn in a wildlife documentary; these things look inherently odd and impossible to us because they suggest that time is in fact reversed. However, microscopic processes are time symmetric—collisions between atoms or chemical reactions—can occur backwards or forwards. So any quest to understand emergence must also include trying to understand how these seemingly contradictory processes can be matched.

Biamonte and colleagues have revisited the foundations of quantum physics dealing with time symmetry laid out by Hungarian-American theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner as early as the late 1920s and reformed into a network theory in terms of "quantum walks"—the equivalent of random walks in the quantum world. In this picture, particles are located on the network’s nodes. The connections between the particles represent the interaction between the particles and "walks" are generally thought of as time-symmetric, jumping backwards and forwards with the same probability. But with clever mathematical insight it is possible to find certain walks that do not follow time-symmetry, giving rise to a host of new quantum behaviors that can potentially be used for technological applications in quantum computing. http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/196

 

Wise words imho, and totally logical.
The rest seems to be just philosophical banter.
What was the BB?
An evolution of space and time as we know them.
Without time, we would have nothing....no space, no gravity, no matter, no energy, no nuthin!!

The following is something I have posted in various threads, and as yet, no one has commented......
https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/relativity/a11332.html
Experiments continue to show that there is no 'space' that stands apart from space-time itself...no arena in which matter, energy and gravity operate which is not affected by matter, energy and gravity. General relativity tells us that what we call space is just another feature of the gravitational field of the universe, so space and space-time can and do not exist apart from the matter and energy that creates the gravitational field. This is not speculation, but sound observation.

 

Thanks for posting that. Do you know which experiments have been done that show this to be true?

 

The link was by Sten Odenwald from NASA.
From my knowledge, no experiment can confirm it, as the laws of physics and GR fail at t+10-43 seconds.
But the BB certainly entails the evolution of space and time [henceforth known as spacetime] in the first instant.
There probably is some energy inherent and emergent from this spacetime and that would be the "Superforce" or the state of phase when the four known forces were one.
But Sten Odenwald's claim appears logical from where I sit.

 

His statement by the way was in the Q+A section of the GP-B site at....
https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/relativity/qanda.html
and was in answer to the question......
Can space exist by itself without matter or energy around?

 

The Answer ?

 

NO

 

correct....
Experiments continue to show that there is no 'space' that stands apart from space-time itself...no arena in which matter, energy and gravity operate which is not affected by matter, energy and gravity. General relativity tells us that what we call space is just another feature of the gravitational field of the universe, so space and space-time can and do not exist apart from the matter and energy that creates the gravitational field. This is not speculation, but sound observation.

 

• "Every cell knows and talks to every other cell. They exchange a thousand bits of information between themselves per second. Cells join together forming a joint web of communication, which in turn forms matter. Cells get together, take on one form, deform, reform — makes no difference, they're all the same. Humans consider themselves unique, so they've rooted their whole theory of existence on their uniqueness. "One" is their unit of "measure" — but its not. All social systems we've put into place are a mere sketch: "one plus one equals two", that's all we've learned, but one plus one has never equaled two — there are in fact no numbers and no letters, we've codified our existence to bring it down to human size, to make it comprehensible, we've created a scale so we can forget its unfathomable scale. Time is the only true unit of measure, it gives proof to the existence of matter, without time, we don’t exist."==From the movie "Lucy"