Past, Present and Future

[Kevin]

Right, but if you look at Humans over the last 12k years, you see continued growth and understanding of what happens around them. Most animals haven't been pushed as much to grow. What if animlas were pushed like Humans have been? As such, if animals had been pushed by themselves and their environment as much as Humans have been, could they begin to understand some of the concepts that Humans have been able to grasp? It really puts a new spin on what intelligence really constitutes.

This has much more to do with our ability to transfer knowledge than most other factors. The pyramids were not built by chance, they were built by people that had an understanding of engineering and mathematics. I saw a special on I think it was Discovery that gave a pretty convincing case based on some items found in a ship wreck that some of the civilizations that were around at the same time the pyramids were built actually did have a grasp on concepts of calculus. That knowledge wasn't transferred though, and theories abound as to why, the apprentice systems that intentionally limited craft knowledge, formal schooling being a different deal for the societies that did use it. Caste systems where people with aptitude where never discovered or nurtured, etc. But it could be that something like calculus, which is fairly significant concept and tool for most sciences has been invented 2 or 3 times in human history.

And the ability to transfer knowledge is controlled by a lot of factors, many of them socio-economic in nature. More efficient farming allows for more people and for more time for those people to think about more than just subsistence living, etc. So progress and knowledge transfer feed each other though there are other factors. Religion is a big one as it can help protect and disseminate knowledge or it can be very good at suppressing it, either way it's been a large factor.

I agree with Pete though if animals had been pushed to learn/transfer knowledge they would be extinct or quite possibly wouldn't be what we think of because only the rare few that could grasp and transfer would have survived. :)

We don't have very detailed records of history beyond about 150 years, we have OK records going back about 300 years and we have spotty records going back about 600. Historians uncover forgotten information all the time some of which has indicated that stuff we thought was "new" had been learned but forgetting hundreds of years ago.

Progress hinges on transfer of knowledge. Or schooling system is based on getting people a basic foundation of that knowledge so they might be able to build on it. Or if that wasn't the intent, that is how it worked when I was going through our public schooling system and college. I wasn't learning anything knew I was getting things that had been discovered transferred to me so I didn't have to "re-invent". :)

[NuurAbSaal]

Fun

Ahaha!:D

I had to look up some words where I wasn't sure about the physics reference (and got hits on most of them!), but that didn't detract from the fun I had. Gluion, ahahahaha!
Cheers!

take care
Tarabulus

[Jim]

Hi :)

Did you say "Cheeseburger Cheeseburger" like in the Saterday Night Live skit with JOHN BELUSHI AND DAN AYKROYD?
http://www.likeitmedia.com/item/32106_john...eeseburger.html

@ Utube - not the SNL skit, The real life cheeseburger cheeseburger restaurant.
The proprietor of Chicago's famed Billy Goat Tavern, immortalized by John Belushi.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guQzlA86BJA...feature=related

Now I have a picture of two Cheeseburgers colliding at ridiculous speed stuck in my (already overworked, as stated) brain. Brilliant.

take care
Tarabulus

[LavCat]

Hi,
You're never old till you quit gaming :D

--Pete

It is through the Scythe of Elune that the barriers of time and space are weakened.

[Rhydderch Hael]

...My brother believes that there is a time period in the Past that remains...

Which is exactly what happens when you get run over by a car and wake up in 1973. On the downside, you get a demotion at work. On the bright side, you get a really cool black leather jacket.

Gene: Serves you right for staying up rutting all night with that new fella of yours. Do you let his guide dog watch?
Phyllis: His guide dog's giving your mam one. From behind.

Now, why would I imagine that? Why would I put that level of detail into it?


--------------------------------------------


I have a time-travel story idea based on the transposition of souls, embracing the idea that necromancy is useful for predicting the future because the afterlife (actually, the limbus between it and the mortal world, as communication from the afterlife proper does not occur) transcends the flow of time.

[Crusader]

Hi, :)

My brother Tommy is my kid brother [age 60] this is when you know you are really old...right Pete?

Why @ 1pm on the phone today did we start to discuss time travel, is this what old men do?

a) My brother believes that there is a time period in the Past that remains, a Present where time moves on based on the future , and that the Future already happend. He added that IF the future did not happen then how come there are those who can predict the future like Nostradamus.

B)I believe there is No future beyond this point in time and at this very moment till the next moment I am making the future for me.

c) What do you think about this ???

To be short, there is no answer that any of our brains can completely comprehend unless one of you is Hawking in disguise.

The future is a relative concept. It is we who perceive time (spacetime in this case) as passing, but it is merely another dimensional axis. To us, there is a future because we move along this axis. So to us, there is a present, while for an imaginary observing living outside these dimensional constraints all moments happen at once. But let me borrow a picture from Wikipedia that makes this a bit clearer I hope:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm.../World_line.svg

Shown here is space (all 3 dimensions, but represented in a 2d surface so our limited perception can understand time added to the picture as a 4th dimension. Here a single proton (light 'particle') travels. In the future or past it may be in different locations, depending on events that modify it's course. We perceive the past as a done fact. But that's not how it is to the outside observer who is not affected by time and can perceive it just as we can perceive the 3 space dimensions. Imagine you can see the time cones from the outside as a theoretical observer.

Now, if you followed me so far: congratulations, you made an important step on your road to understanding quantum mechanics. I can't explain it as well as Hawking can (I TRIED understanding his book, but after 8 or 9 dimensions my brain hurt).

Ok, now it gets interesting. Is the future as defined as the past? We perceive past time as a done fact. Is the future a done fact as well? Yes, it is for people who are in the future, who perceive our present as past, some might argue. The counterargument is that time travel is impossible. That time is immutable and people can not move to future or past. Therefore, there is no future observer yet. Therefore, the future is still malleable. Then there's the theory that there are infinite dimensions, one for each 'possible' timeline. A particle took a left turn or a right turn when it hit another perfectly. Each option spawns a dimension. Popular pop culture reference: Sliders (while it was of course not very scientifical, since if you slide dimensions once you have a near infinite to one chance to find a habitable planet on the other side).

But it has already been proven that within our universe it is possible to modify the effects of time. At super heavy singularities (black holes being the most popular example) the effect of time is altered even to our limited perception. For all intents and purposes, time does either not exist or is held immobile in a black hole from our perspective, while it may very well exist from inside the black's hole perspective.

Scientists are still trying to figure out what the future is theoretically. Is it malleable or not? Are we just simply acting out or lives, while the outside observer already knows everything that will transpire to us? Or are we changing it as we go, and if we do, do we leave behind an infinite amount of mirror universes for every particle that collided and chose left or right? First what we have to do is define time. No one defined what time really is yet. The damn thing is that we're trapped in time and lack the outsider's perspective who can look at time without being affected by it. We can see time doing strange things when near singularities. to our perspective it seems to slow, but in reality it's not time that's changing, but merely our perception of it. This is part of the theory of relativity and theories derived therefrom.

Quantum mechanics tells us something different altogether, but it's so damn complex I can hardly comprehend it. For starters, you have to ditch every concept of the universe as we know it, because those laws for the most part don't apply to the subatomic soup where quantum mechanics plays out. For example, an electron circling a proton can be at any point in a certain orbit. But it can't be predicted by the outside observer. It's impossible to tell where it will be in any moment in time, according to quantum mechanics it's in all places at once and none of those places at the same time. Now, your brain is protesting right now, I know. It's shouting at your it MUST be at one place. But that's the tricky part, this is not true in the quantum mechanical level. Here's a video explaining it:
http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/887801/a71...mmechanica.html

So even in our own universe, there are different possibilities happening at the same time. Weirdness. And you want to tell what time is? Good luck.:)

[Maitre]

c) What do you think about this ???

In which frame of reference? :P

To the original topic: I won't pretend that I have a complete grasp of the physics involved in the posts of others in the thread, but like others I struggled through Hawking's A Brief History of Time, and reading Pete's post brought some of that back, but I always find myself brought back to the concept of "frame of reference." I obviously won't be using the term with the same scientific interpretation that relativity does, but as a phrase describing the individual state of perception in the "present" (also not going into the debate of event vs. observation defining occurrence).

Sitting here at my desk, I can, with some limited degree of general accuracy, predict my immediate future: in 15 minutes, I'll be on a conference call; 45 minutes later I'll be frustrated, 40 minutes after that I expect to be having lunch of some variety. But these are my projections, based on prior experience and trends I've observed: they have nothing to do with actual "events" that may or may not exist in a persistent predetermined or objective "future," whether or not I observe them. Does an objective (predetermined) future exist: irrelevant (at an individual level at least) I say! Because I can't access it, observe it, experience it, or use it in any way, the existence of a persistent future is more or less irrelevant to me. I'll grant you that whether this access is beyond the potential of my intellect/biology, or simply beyond my training may be a relevant argument: if accessing the future is possible and I simply haven't learned to do it, then I've fallen into something like the bad side of Pascal's Wager, however, currently I can't access the future, so what do I care if it exists as a persistent set of events. (Tangent, yes the non-existence/existence of a predetermined future distinguishes between the present existence of choice and the present existence of the illusion of choice, but if it feels like love, isn't it love?)

Re: the past:: I might believe that the "past" exists because I have memories of it, or I have evidence of actions I previously took. However, these are not evidence that a persistent "past" exists, they are only evidence of my belief, or at the most, evidence that the frames of reference that I remember did exist at one time. If I forget something, has that section of the objective past stopped existing, or has that set of frames disappeared from the [film]real in my head? Surely, if an objective persistent past exists, it isn't sustained by my recollection of it: it would simply exist; and my perception at the time I passed through it would be either maintained or lost depending on my mind's determination of its relative importance. Similar to my argument against the future, I have no way of revisiting the past in any meaningful way: I can't return to some period in my past and behave in a different way (again, regardless of whether I am actually incapable or simply untrained), so what is there to tell me that some persistent past exists, and if it does, what do I care?

What I should care about is how my present actions, and my past present actions will determine my future present actions and options (again dispensing with the argument between choice and illusory choice for the time being). I can make use of my recorded past present actions, and the past present actions of others as data points in predicting trends that may affect my future present: my recollection of my previous mortgage statements and my bank balance tells me that I'm likely to get similar bills in the future, and continuing to receive a paycheck would be a good way to keep having some place to keep my future present stuff and my future present family. However, my sphere of control will continue to be in what I perceive as the present, regardless of my intention to prepare for some future present.

Yes, this view may be less than well thought out and less than well presented. Sure it could be seen as anti-progress: rather than asking “does it exist?” followed by “if it did, how could I get there?” I’m stating that “I can’t get there, so why be bothered about whether it exists.” But that’s why I like the way the question was asked. I would have avoided posting in a thread about whether the future or the past exist, but I’m happy to post in a thread about what I think on the subject. And again, I’m speaking from my own experience, as one of the little people (on a cosmic scale) I’m only concerned with what I can do day to day to help me in what may happen in my conception of tomorrow, or next week or next year. Bigger thinking people may have bigger thoughts, and they’re welcome to them, I’m happy with my pipe-weed, my crops, and my ale.

[kandrathe]

He added that IF the future did not happen then how come there are those who can predict the future like Nostradamus.

Yeah, I agree with Jester on Nostradamus. It's not like he said, "London will be devastated by a tidal wave on July 12, 2012." Prophecy, when given cryptically, and couched in vagueness is not much use if you need to fit it to past events.

But, I believe the topic deserves objective open minded skepticism.

A fairly schientific approach was done by an aeronautical engineer, "An Experiment with Time" by J. W. Dunne. He was obsessed with trying to understand his own prescient dreams, and the nature of time itself. Based on his careful observations, he constructed a view of the universe where in our unconsciousness we experience time as a jumble of past, present and future combined. He is not the only person in history to arrive at this conclusion, as it fits with the Mayan, Aboriginal Australian, and even St. Thomas Aquinas.

Hence, again, my interest in scientific quantum processes related to human consciousness.

Again, we are back to consciousness, and our waking experience being bound into our reality of 3 physical dimensions and moving linearly forward in a time dimension, as Pete described, at a rate of 1 second per second. But, we know by the work of mathematicians and physicists (e.g. Einstein, Hawking, et. al.) that time is not a steady stream, and that both space and time are greatly perturbed by the existence of matter itself. In a nutshell, I view time as a human construct that helps us explain our reality. Consider that at the moment of the big bang, the universe as we know it (both space and time) began.

Or, as Crusader mentioned, perception is anchored to our experience of reality, but we might hypothesize an observer who exists in a different frame of reference with more dimensions of space-time, who would view us as we view a painting on a canvas, or perhaps as a single photon flashing into existence for just a moment (welcome to Who-ville). We can describe that as multiple universes, or dimensions beyond our perceptions, but this enters the realm of untestable metaphysical speculation.

A last comment on travel though time other than (forwards at 1 second per second); We know that the closer you are to a large mass (gravitational time dilation) slows time, and the faster you move in relation to the origin (special relativistic time dilation) slows time. In other words, if you theoretically blasted off earth toward a fairly massless area of space and accelerated to near light speed for a year, then returned to earth two years later, the time difference would be that two years passed for the spacecraft, but 20 years have passed on Earth. Now, you, would be the younger brother.

[Jester]

A fairly schientific approach was done by an aeronautical engineer, "An Experiment with Time" by J. W. Dunne. He was obsessed with trying to understand his own prescient dreams, and the nature of time itself. Based on his careful observations, he constructed a view of the universe where in our unconsciousness we experience time as a jumble of past, present and future combined. He is not the only person in history to arrive at this conclusion, as it fits with the Mayan, Aboriginal Australian, and even St. Thomas Aquinas.

This is "objective open minded skepticism"? This sounds like unadulterated crankery - connecting up various dots with tenuous theorizing, without any rigorous testing or even internal consistency. Look at the laundry list - Mayans? Aboriginals? Thomas Aquinas? Why not add Nostradamus - he sounds like he'd fit right in.

The method described in the wiki article, essentially a dream journal, screams "confirmation bias". It sounds like Jung's synchronicity, which is also just an exercise in "predicting" the future by making spurious connections. The left-brain is a powerful tool for finding patterns, but it is well-documented that it will find patterns whether they exist or not. It is incredibly easy to generate a plausible, but wrong, theory to explain just about anything. Mysticism relies heavily on this function.

Point me to where he actually offers a repeatable, properly controlled test of this stuff. From where I sit, this looks like mystical navel-gazing. We have no reason to suspect that human consciousness, wonderful and complex though it may be, has any kind of privileged access to spacetime. Remote viewing, prophecy, and the like have never passed any well-constructed scientific test.

-Jester

[--Pete]

Hi,

I'm sorry, but there are a few errors and misconceptions in your post. The fundamental question in this thread is not 'what is the future' but rather 'is the future fixed'.

To be short, there is no answer that any of our brains can completely comprehend unless one of you is Hawking in disguise.

Without knowing what the answer is, it's a bit premature to assume we will not understand it. Or that Hawking will.

The future is a relative concept.

No, it is a well defined concept. For any event, all the space-time contained in the light cone of that event is either its past or its future. To determine which of the two, one uses the second law of thermodynamics. The direction in which the entropy of a closed system increases is the future.

It is we who perceive time (spacetime in this case) as passing, but it is merely another dimensional axis. To us, there is a future because we move along this axis.

Meaningless. That's like saying, "when you take a trip, you perceive the scenery passing, but it is merely another dimensional axis." True, but vacuous.

So to us, there is a present, while for an imaginary observing living outside these dimensional constraints all moments happen at once.

This is total nonsense. You can postulate anything you want. An imaginary observer for whom everything happens at the same place. One for whom the universe is a single event and all space and time is collapsed to a point. An observer who lives in a six dimensional universe, where there are multiple time axis (RAH The Number of the Beast). Or even one where children never grow old and can fly with the help of pixie dust. It's called 'fantasy', and if done well can be great fun. But it is not a good basis for modeling the universe.

But let me borrow a picture from Wikipedia that makes this a bit clearer I hope:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm.../World_line.svg

.svg? Sorry, but a link to something that requires me to find and download some program to view it is just a bit too much trouble.
EDIT: I think I found your picture.

Shown here is space (all 3 dimensions, but represented in a 2d surface so our limited perception can understand time added to the picture as a 4th dimension. Here a single proton (light 'particle') travels. In the future or past it may be in different locations, depending on events that modify it's course.

Of course, without actually seeing the image you are referring to, I don't know if the errors are yours or its. However, at the very least: a 'proton' is not a light particle, a 'photon' is. And a photon is *always* moving in any reference frame other than its own, and it is moving at the speed of light in all those frames. Of course, if you want to get even more 'correct' the photon isn't really moving anywhere. As the single photon interferometer experiment displays, the trajectory of a photon is a meaningless concept. But mixing relativity with quantum mechanics is a bit tricky.

Now, if you followed me so far: congratulations, you made an important step on your road to understanding quantum mechanics.

Actually, someone who has made it uncritically to here is more misinformed then when he started. Most of what you've said is, quite frankly, BS. And nothing of which you've addressed has anything to do with quantum mechanics -- it all falls under the domain of relativity. The two theories are not only separate, but to this time, irreconcilable. Really, if you're going to honestly discuss these matters, perhaps you should at least take the trouble to know the name of the field you are discussing.

I can't explain it as well as Hawking can (I TRIED understanding his book, but after 8 or 9 dimensions my brain hurt).

Which book? He has written several. Some are for the general public, at least one for is people who actually understand the subject (The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime, I linked to it in a previous post). If it is this last one, then congratulations if you understood any of it. It takes a certain natural talent for math along with years of study and practice to be able to think at that level on that subject.

Ok, now it gets interesting. Is the future as defined as the past? We perceive past time as a done fact. Is the future a done fact as well? Yes, it is for people who are in the future, who perceive our present as past, some might argue.

?

The counterargument is that time travel is impossible. That time is immutable and people can not move to future or past.

Whether time travel is possible and whether time travel can be used to change the past are actually two different issues. And they are tangential to the question of whether the future is fixed.

Then there's the theory that there are infinite dimensions, one for each 'possible' timeline. A particle took a left turn or a right turn when it hit another perfectly. Each option spawns a dimension.

This, of course, makes the original question moot. Since every possible future will occur, asking if 'the' future is fixed is meaningless. The best one could say is along the lines of "collectively, they're fixed, individually, they're not."

But it has already been proven that within our universe it is possible to modify the effects of time. At super heavy singularities (black holes being the most popular example) the effect of time is altered even to our limited perception. For all intents and purposes, time does either not exist or is held immobile in a black hole from our perspective, while it may very well exist from inside the black's hole perspective.

You don't need anything nearly as exotic as a black hole. Velocity and gravitational time dilation combined-effect tests using nothing more than precision clocks and airliners have done a sufficiently good job of supporting relativity. And millions verify it daily when they use GPS.

BTW, 'super heavy singularities' is redundant. A singularity is a point in space-time where the curvature becomes infinite. Although it has been speculated that a naked singularity might exist under some circumstances, singularities are still strictly a theoretical concept. Most 'regular' singularities, if they exist, are shielded by an 'event horizon'. By their very nature, they are regions where the theory fails. Perhaps you meant 'super heavy black holes'?

Scientists are still trying to figure out what the future is theoretically. Is it malleable or not? Are we just simply acting out or lives, while the outside observer already knows everything that will transpire to us? Or are we changing it as we go, and if we do, do we leave behind an infinite amount of mirror universes for every particle that collided and chose left or right?

Right now, these are questions in philosophy, not science. There are, AFAIK, no proposed testable theories to explain or predict any of those speculations.

First what we have to do is define time. No one defined what time really is yet.

Been there, done that. See above. It's as well or as poorly defined as 'space'. One defines things by their properties, and the properties of space-time are pretty well understood on the level we've been able to observe so far. We might, probably will, have to refine those definitions as we learn more. But the new definitions will have to reduce to the present definitions in the domain of the present definitions.

The damn thing is that we're trapped in time and lack the outsider's perspective who can look at time without being affected by it. We can see time doing strange things when near singularities. to our perspective it seems to slow, but in reality it's not time that's changing, but merely our perception of it. This is part of the theory of relativity and theories derived therefrom.

No. Were trapped in space, too, and yet nobody seems to think we can't understand it. And, to each observer anywhere, one second takes one second to pass in his reference frame. Our perception of time remains the Newtonian flow at a constant rate. It is only when we compare our observations with those in a different frame that we find differences. But the observers in each of the frames do not perceive these differences.

Quantum mechanics tells us something different altogether, but it's so damn complex I can hardly comprehend it.

That's because you don't know its language. No natural language contains the concepts and the means to manipulate them that quantum mechanics requires. Learning the prerequisite math is difficult. 'Understanding' quantum mechanics once the math has been mastered is not. I put 'understanding' in quotes because it is not the type of understanding we normally think of. We understand how a saw cuts wood. We have a mental image of the processes, of edges and hardness and sharpness. In quantum mechanics, we have nothing but the math. We can develop an intuition for how things work, but it is a different type of understanding.

For starters, you have to ditch every concept of the universe as we know it, because those laws for the most part don't apply to the subatomic soup where quantum mechanics plays out.

Yes and no. One of the basic axioms of quantum mechanics is that it has to reduce to the classical limit when appropriate. Thus, a baseball has a trajectory in quantum mechanics, and it is the same as that of classical mechanics. Just a bit more difficult to calculate.;)

For example, an electron circling a proton can be at any point in a certain orbit. But it can't be predicted by the outside observer. It's impossible to tell where it will be in any moment in time, according to quantum mechanics it's in all places at once and none of those places at the same time.

Actually, 'circling' and 'orbit' are meaningless in this context. QM does not even address the question of the location of the electron, indeed in this context, location isn't even a concept. It is possible to tell (i.e., measure) the location of the electron, but that disrupts the system so that it is impossible to predict where the electron will be. QM does not say "it's in all places at once and none of those places at the same time". Indeed, all it tells are the odds of finding it somewhere. The plots of the probability distribution are often (mistakenly) presented as location maps of the electrons. Indeed, even their name, atomic orbital, is a throw back to the old quantum theory.

Now, your brain is protesting right now, I know. It's shouting at your it MUST be at one place. But that's the tricky part, this is not true in the quantum mechanical level. Here's a video explaining it:
http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/887801/a71...mmechanica.html

Nice video, suitable for elementary school science class. However, if you pay attention to it, you'll notice that nothing is explained. The behavior of the two slit experiment is presented, the results under different conditions are also presented (and, BTW, the results shown for the single slit is incorrect), but there isn't a word of 'explanation'. Instead, there is a bunch of anthropomorphism, with things like the electron choosing and 'as if it knew it was being watched'. Trying to understand QM in this way is a little like mapping the audible spectrum into the visible spectrum, using the map to translate music into colors, and then using the result to understand the Fifth by looking at its picture. At best, the understanding will be superficial and inherently wrong.

So even in our own universe, there are different possibilities happening at the same time. Weirdness. And you want to tell what time is? Good luck.:)

Actually, there is no such thing as the same time without also having the same place. Otherwise, it is relative.

Please don't take this as an attack on you. I am simply trying to set the facts right. If you were spreading misinformation about a game related topic, many would object. And yet, it would only be a game. To me, at least, reality is more important than a game.

--Pete

[--Pete]

Hi,

Love your post.

Re: the past:: I might believe that the "past" exists because I have memories of it, or I have evidence of actions I previously took. However, these are not evidence that a persistent "past" exists, they are only evidence of my belief, or at the most, evidence that the frames of reference that I remember did exist at one time.

This topic comes up all the time and yet there never seems to be any definite answer given, or maybe even possible.

Descartes has given an argument which appears irrefutable as to the existence of *an* individual. But is that individual you, or me, or somebody else (personally, I think it might be a cat)? Kant (and others) has shown that we only know what we know through our senses. But since we only know of our senses through themselves, then we actually 'know' nothing. More correctly, we cannot prove anything beyond our individual existence. Hence the famous final exam question, "Prove the existence of this chair." with its only correct answer, "What chair?"

With or without (although 'with' is easier) a supreme being, it is possible to speculate that the universe came into existence an arbitrary short interval ago -- whether 5000 years or a nanosecond doesn't matter. Everything we 'know' from before then is just part of that creation process. All we have to save us from this is Occam's razor.

So, ultimately one must pick the assumptions under which he'll live. An objective, external universe is one of mine. But I recognize it is a belief, not a fact.

--Pete

[Jim]

Hi, :)

In physics, the world line of an object is the unique path of that object as it travels through 4-dimensional spacetime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line

I did a "properties" on the URL, then copy & paste it to a new browser window, now it is a matter of elimination & doing a search @ wiki for "World Line".

http://<strike>upload.</strike>wikimedia.org/<strike>wikipedia/commons/1/16/World_line.svg</strike>

ps: I always check my URL in the "Preview Post" :w00t:

[--Pete]

Hi,

In other words, if you theoretically blasted off earth toward a fairly massless area of space and accelerated to near light speed for a year, then returned to earth two years later, the time difference would be that two years passed for the spacecraft, but 20 years have passed on Earth.

I'd like to point out that that article is wrong. Specifically, "How the seeming contradiction is resolved, . . . can be explained within the standard framework of special relativity." is false. The explanation that is given in that article, and elsewhere, requires one brother to instantaneously change from being at rest with his twin to moving at a large velocity away from his twin. It further requires him to instantaneously change from moving away to moving toward his twin. These instantaneous changes in velocity would require infinite forces and infinite power (not to mention turning the 'moving' twin into raspberry jam).

This is just one of many cases where the answer is right, but the explanation is wrong. Things do fall down, but not because they are seeking to return to their proper sphere. :whistling:

--Pete

[--Pete]

Hi,

ps: I always check my URL in the "Preview Post" :w00t:

Yeah, me too. BTW, thanks for the link. Turns out that image is used in a number of articles.

--Pete

[kandrathe]

This is "objective open minded skepticism"? This sounds like unadulterated crankery - connecting up various dots with tenuous theorizing, without any rigorous testing or even internal consistency. Look at the laundry list - Mayans? Aboriginals? Thomas Aquinas? Why not add Nostradamus - he sounds like he'd fit right in.

The method described in the wiki article, essentially a dream journal, screams "confirmation bias". It sounds like Jung's synchronicity, which is also just an exercise in "predicting" the future by making spurious connections. The left-brain is a powerful tool for finding patterns, but it is well-documented that it will find patterns whether they exist or not. It is incredibly easy to generate a plausible, but wrong, theory to explain just about anything. Mysticism relies heavily on this function.

Open minded would be to read his book. Why the kerfuffle? You said, "Sounds like" three times, which screams to me "prejudice". His theory, as many are in the mostly untestable metaphysical realm, may very well be wrong. But, as has been the case in science for centuries, wrong theories often steer us closer to better wrong theories.

In referencing Aboriginals, Mayans, and St. Thomas Aquinas, I was actually contrasting, not comparing. I was merely stating that other people have had perceptions about space-time, that differ from the Newtonian/Lagrangian linearity as was main stream physics not even 100 years ago. The contrast was that J.W. Dunne documented his work and kept detailed dream journals to attempt to understand IF he was experiencing precognition. This is a testable, scientific approach to creating a falsifiable hypothesis. Did his dreams contain sufficient details about future events as to indicate precognition? Read his book to find out.

Point me to where he actually offers a repeatable, properly controlled test of this stuff. From where I sit, this looks like mystical navel-gazing. We have no reason to suspect that human consciousness, wonderful and complex though it may be, has any kind of privileged access to spacetime. Remote viewing, prophecy, and the like have never passed any well-constructed scientific test.

No, I don't need to point to anything other than his written work. It stands or fails on its own accord. If you were open minded, you'd read it as at least an interesting opinion on a theory that may contradict your own. This is not a mystical or religious book, so don't be afraid. It's entirely secular. I'm sure your local library has a copy. The two questions I would ask of myself before cracking the spine would be, does this author seems credible and is this author believable? Or, more simply, is he a crackpot or a liar? The burden then for you would be to either read the book with those questions unanswered, or determine them and then decide whether his work is unbelievable or rubbish. He wouldn't be the first, or last to have developed an incorrect or flawed theory, but an objective open minded skeptic might know the difference. I'm also a big fan and have read everything Lovecraft as well, but it hasn't warped my world view... too much...

P.S. Also, you might know that "Brains" and understanding them are a hobby of mine. In that end, if you wanted to be very brave, you might also check out "Irreducible Mind" by Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, and Bruce Greyson. I'm grounded enough to learn and speculate about the "What might be", without losing track of the "What we can prove". In many endeavors in my life I'm a philosopher, and not merely a scientist. If I limited my reading to only what is verifiable TRUTH, then I'd be a mathematician, and even then I'd be frustrated by the preponderance of falsity in the literature. Certainly NOT, a historian, and followed closely by any number of sciences. Science is merely unique because they have a peer reviewed method for generating their BS. :D

[kandrathe]

These instantaneous changes in velocity would require infinite forces and infinite power (not to mention turning the 'moving' twin into raspberry jam).

Why would "instantaneous" be necessary.

I thought the Hafele-Keating experiment verified the relativistic effects of velocity.

[Jester]

Do you read every last thing someone thinks you should read? I know I don't. I spend a lot of time in libraries, and it gives me a pretty fair sense of the obvious: nobody can possibly judge everything by reading through it. That's a fool's game.

Instead, I ask the simple, scientific questions of all paranormal claims: Is this replicable? In a well-controlled experiment? If not, I'm not sure why I should take it seriously.

I ask you because we discuss things here. Can these questions be answered quickly? For all your bolded, extra-sized text and preaching about open-mindedness, you certainly haven't answered them.

-Jester

[kandrathe]

Instead, I ask the simple, scientific questions of all paranormal claims: Is this replicable? In a well-controlled experiment?

Yes.

[Jester]

Yes.

Care to describe it? Or going to make me do the legwork?

Edit: I ask for specifics because you already did give a vague description, and (as I said) it sounds like a poster child for confirmation bias:

The contrast was that J.W. Dunne documented his work and kept detailed dream journals to attempt to understand IF he was experiencing precognition. This is a testable, scientific approach to creating a falsifiable hypothesis. Did his dreams contain sufficient details about future events as to indicate precognition? Read his book to find out.

This does not even in theory offer a method for falsifying the theory of precognition - it fails at Popper 101. Worse, it offers obvious method for generating false positives. This is the horoscope method of predicting the future - write something down, observe the events of the day, then look backwards and find some way of making the events fit the prediction.

-Jester

[kandrathe]

Care to describe it? Or going to make me do the legwork?

He details it in the chapter "The Experiment". Generally, he has a detailed journal of his (and later others) dreams, where he notes everything remembered from them. When he reviews the real world experiences to what was recorded in journal, and critically notes whether the event was "predictable" based upon logic, probability and reason, or probable based on current events.

I can give you a real life example, which still has me baffled to explain... A good friend told me about a weird dream he had, meeting a woman named Mary Hastings, who was terribly worried because she had discovered she had cancer. He described her to me in great detail. In his dream he remembers telling her not to worry because her cancer would go into remission, and she would be fine. He didn't know any Mary Hastings. About a month later, a different friend of his set him up on a blind date and the woman's daughter was the Mary Hastings from his dream, and the rest of the dream unfolded. I witnessed the before and after, and I have no explanation for this event.