Thanks for the clear and timely responses -- very helpful. (Though I assume .Scott meant to say, "In both cases, they will accelerate towards each other."
All basic laws of physics are said to respect CPT symmetry, and Maxwell's equations in particular are time-symmetric. But here's a simple scenario I find very puzzling:
Two particles of opposite charge attract each other. In the time-reversed picture, they'd repel each other, no? But they...
This came out recently. http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0813
QUANTROPY
JOHN C. BAEZ AND BLAKE S. POLLARD
In statistical mechanics we can recover Boltzmann’s formula by maximizing entropy subject to a constraint on the expected energy. This raises the question: what is the quantum mechanical...
Nice to find your post Christmas morning... It's a thought I've been pondering for a long time. Superposition is a very reasonable way of describing the future -- as a bundle of more and less likely possibilities for what might happen next, given the current factual situation. And the...
Hi Erland –
I agree with the comments above that there’s no point in redefining “simultaneity”. The word strongly implies a two-way relation: if event A is simultaneous with event B, we assume B is also simultaneous with A. As you point out, that’s not the case if we take simultaneity as...
I agree with you in part... in general, wherever there’s “relational structure” there are also things of some kind IN the relationships. I don’t believe in “standalone information” for the same reason I don’t believe in “standalone things”.
Though it’s intuitively obvious to us that...
I agree that top down vs bottom-up is a different issue. For Ellis and Apeiron the two issues are closely related, but that's not the way I look at it. Both "top-down" and "bottom up" are ways of describing the world from an outside (objective) viewpoint. My argument is that this viewpoint...
There are quite a few entries in the latest FQXi essay contest on this theme, including one I wrote -- An Observable World.
The idea is that a fundamental theory in physics needs to address two distinct kinds of structure -- both the structure of what we think of as objective reality, and...
I posted some thoughts about this a few years ago... currently working on a paper that talks about how information needs to be defined, in physics. The main thing is that if we define information quantitatively, in terms of “bits”, we can conveniently bypass the quantum measurement problem –...
I think a discussion of complexity needs to focus on the difference – which occurs at every level – between the things involved and the relationships that can happen between those things. For example, between atoms and the relationships atoms have with each other, which are the basis for...
Here's a link to an interesting paper that reconceives simultaneity in physical terms, relating to the world on the observer's past light-cone. This is quite different from our usual notion of objective simultaneity, which doesn't work in Relativity unless events are proximate. But it does...
The problem with the “block time” concept is that it takes seriously one aspect of Minkowski’s spacetime and ignores the other. It focuses on the fact that spacetime is a 4-dimensional manifold, and ignores the different signs of the space and time dimensions.
When we imagine a “block...
I’m working on a post for the BSM or Quantum forum on “The Observer”. In short, I think attempts to combine Quantum theory and Relativity while ignoring the viewpoint of the observer will probablly go nowhere. The alternative is to describe the physical world both from the objective “God’s-eye...
This makes sense to me. And it clearly applies to all kinds of biological systems, not just ones we would call “conscious”. In fact, something a lot like this happens in physics as well. In quantum mechanics, the wave function that describes the “state” of any physical system is a statistical...
I think there are two almost unrelated issues being confused in this kind of discussion. One is about the kind of consciousness we humans experience. To say this is “biological circuitry and nothing more” would simply be foolish, since it’s obvious that language and culture play a major part...