Intriguing question about Time, Physics and SRT in general

So essentially your point is that you cannot understand that the term 'now' does not mean the absence of time. What a waste of everyones time.

 

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if you are writing to me... Nope...you are wrong as usual....
If I am not mistaken the term "Now" is not used in physics but is more used in philosophy... what say you now?

 

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It doesn't matter how many times you say it: it won't stop being wrong.

 

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according to who?

 

According to anyone who understands what a spacetime diagram is/is for.

 

so uhm how long does an observer exist for in a single instant of zero duration time as described in the light cones diagram?
and you accuse me of being contradictory..eh?

 

You can't escape the logic. It is too strong...
the point between past and future cones MUST be zero duration to prohibit absolute rest.
and if that point is zero duration then there is nothing to observe and nothing to do the observing.
And that is the "intriguing thing I mentioned in the thread title...

How you can escape the logic I do not know...it is obvious and axiomatic.

 

I already answered that:

No, I didn't say you are "contradictory": you are just wrong. However, we can add to that having poor language skills.

Tell you what though: if I draw your first post on a spacetime diagram, it would be awesome if the rest would disappear!

 

ahh! i think I see where you are coming from.

any event whether predicted or historical must fall between it's past and future light cone. [ for it to have happened, to happen in the future or happen in the present HSP.]

This doesn't effect the logic that at any zero duration point between future and past, the observer is non existent. [simply because it is zero duration ~axiomatic.]

This issue is overcome, I believe, by the consideration that the event is part of a continuum of movement [time] and not ever able to be deemed a single instant in time.
The universe is after all existing and will exist in time only. It can not exist with out time or movement. [ no absolute rest ]

 

The problem that comes to the fore and is the intriguing bit can be described using the following example:
"At exactly 10 am the distance from here to the next town was 100kms."
and true, the actual distance is 100 kms but only in a continuum of time.

If you wish to take just that single zero duration point in time only the distance has to be zero. And that is the intriguing thing. IMO

 

I don't care whether you think Relativity is correct or not, or whether you think it's logically sound or not. You don't have the basic mathematical tools to understand it or apply it, let alone evaluate and judge it, nor do you have any means of understanding the many historical reasons the theory was developed in the first place (hint: it's not because Einstein thought Newton's mechanics weren't pretty enough).

What I do care about is you taking your personal lack of understanding and asserting it in the physics section as fact, as if argument by ignorance were sufficient to prove whatever you happen to find personally convincing. The suggestion in your OP is altogether wrong. If at the moment labelled "present", the observer and the rest of the universe couldn't exist, then what the hell is all that stuff in the observer's past light cone supposed to represent? If I asserted that Catholics ritually molest their firstborn children, not only would it be incredibly insulting, but it would be just plain wrong, and they'd be rightly upset about it. Likewise, your ramblings about how physics works are so mind-bogglingly insane and unfounded, it's like watching you holding your finger up to make an important point and then belting out "Oi thenk the sun doesn't exist!" like some kind of oaf in a cartoon. It's the kind of argument that deserves to be rewarded with jellybeans and gumdrops, not Nobel prizes.

Like BruceP, I also said the observer exists along a continuum of time, and the light cone only represents causal effects related to the observer's position at one specific moment. Again, light cones don't suggest that for an instant "an observer and his universe would be non-existent", because then they wouldn't mark off a past light cone which contains events that occurred elsewhere in this supposedly "nonexistent" universe, and they wouldn't mark off a future light cone with events that will occur elsewhere in the universe which can be influenced by them at a later time. Should I infer that you no longer exist until I happen to read your next post? Well it would be even more stupid to conclude that about the universe as a whole. Yeah, I can't see what's happening on the other side of the galaxy at this exact very moment, nor will I be able to know what happened today for another hundred thousand years, so I guess the other side of the galaxy no longer exists... Derp.

No, it only attacks your own credibility, insofar as thinking that knowing the names "Einstein" and "Minkowski" and looking at pictures of light cones means you know enough about Relativity to make "profound" assertions about it.

Ok, so you profess to know so much about these light cone diagrams, that you can see beyond what mainstream scientists have been reading into them for the last 100 years. Tell me then what's so important about the Minkowski metric in Relativity, and the implications it has for light cones under translations, rotations and boosts in flat space.

 

What do I say now?

I say, so essentially your point is that you cannot understand that the term 'now' does not mean the absence of time. What a waste of everyones time.

If from the sentece, "the term 'now'" is upsetting you, lets try this:

So essentially your point is that you cannot understand that the concept of 'now' does not mean the absence of time. What a waste of everyones time.

The main point is you are wasting everyones time and I suspect you are just doing this for your own amusement.

 

and how do you justify your incredibly arrogant statement?
I am all ears... go for it...

 

That's a definition of the present, yes.

Still wrong, but I agree that it doesn't affect your [I'll]logic, since - again - the diagram just plain says no such thing.

Again: the diagram doesn't say you exist for zero duration, it says an event in your unspecified duration of existence is zero time. Or: the diagram doesn't say how long you have existed, much less that you have existed for zero time.

I hesitate to respond to the rest of your jibber jabber, since most of it is meaningless word salad, but that's wrong too. This doesn't say anything about absolute rest. Your usage of the term implies you don't know what it means.

 

Which statement? That you don't understand the fundamentals of Relativity and light cones? I can justify that entirely from what you've posted here about light cones somehow implying the rest of the universe doesn't exist. No, if you follow your own logic there's nothing arrogant about it at all- you're saying that because the light cone says events occurring today at the opposite end of the galaxy can't be detected by us in the present, but only 100,000 years in the future, and what we see of the other side of the galaxy is information about what happened 100,000 years ago, this means the other side of the galaxy doesn't presently exist. Well no, light cones do not teach us that the other side of the galaxy doesn't presently exist.

But here's your chance to tell us what you do know about light cones and Relativity, by explaining to us how they relate to the transformation properties of the Minkowski spacetime metric under translations, rotations and boosts. Show us that you're not just dropping names to try and look knowledgeable.

 

What baffles me is how all these posters who think they've revealed a profound new fact about the universe, can't seem to be bothered to go learn the fundamentals from high school up so that they can rigorously argue for and demonstrate their revelations and save the human species from intergalactic conquest/fiery apocalyptic doom.

 

By golly I am upsetting you aren't I... .

tell you what... you define the term "energy" is a consistent manner and I will think about it...

 

nothing new... about event horizons... been around for as long as the universe has... duh!

 

well what do you think the term absolute rest means?
To me it means that the HSP for any event would have time duration >0... simple.
If you have a better definition I'd like to hear of it....

 

No. Because you can make a light cone diagram for Newtonian spacetime, a spacetime with absolute rest.

The difference for Newtonian spacetime is that the lightcone drawn would be light sent from or received from objects at rest. One could draw similar lightcones where light had an added Galilean velocity.

The point between past and future lightcones must be 0 length for the same reason that the point between (everything greater than 5 on a ruler) and (everything less than five on a ruler) must be 0 length.

If you can figure that out, then you might be able to think of the fundamentals of physics.

Except that your diagram stipulated that there was an observer and that light is reaching that observer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn08cA5zNAI