Has anyone heard any more about this guy

[Cosmo16]

hey, just wondering if anyone had seen anything on this theory.
Link

 

[chronon]

hey, just wondering if anyone had seen anything on this theory.
Link

Yes. Peter Lynds had some interesting philosophical ideas about time. Unfortunately neither Lynds nor the media which picked this up seemed to know the difference between philosophy and science, and its presented as overturning a lot of established science (which it doesn't). I've written more about this at http://www.chronon.org/Articles/ZenoLynds.html

 

[JesseM]

Yes. Peter Lynds had some interesting philosophical ideas about time. Unfortunately neither Lynds nor the media which picked this up seemed to know the difference between philosophy and science, and its presented as overturning a lot of established science (which it doesn't). I've written more about this at http://www.chronon.org/Articles/ZenoLynds.html

On your page you say "There seems to be a large body of opinion that Zeno's paradoxes are solved by Einstein's Special theory of relativity"--who says this? I have always seen people say that the solution to Zeno's paradox is just the fact that, in calculus, an infinite series can have a finite sum.

I think one major problem with Lynd's philosophical argument is this:

It might also be argued by analogy with the claim by some people that the so-called 'block universe model', i.e. a 4-dimensional model of physical reality, incorporating time as well as space, is static or unchanging. This claim however involves thecommon mistake of failing to recognize that unless there is another time dimension, it simply doesn't make sense to say that the block universe is static, for there is no 'external' time interval over which it remains the same.

"Unchanging" does not necessarily mean that a thing stays the same at multiple points in time, it can also just mean that the thing exists timelessly--for example, mathematical objects such as the real number line or the Mandelbrot set can be said to be unchanging, that doesn't imply there is a time dimension in the mathematical world. So why can't we say that spacetime is unchanging in the same sense that the real number line is unchanging?

By the way chronon, the java applets on your website all fail to load on my browser, do they work on yours or is there something wrong with them? I thought the idea of a http://www.chronon.org/Applets/bouncer.html was pretty neat...

 

[chronon]

On your page you say "There seems to be a large body of opinion that Zeno's paradoxes are solved by Einstein's Special theory of relativity"--who says this? I have always seen people say that the solution to Zeno's paradox is just the fact that, in calculus, an infinite series can have a finite sum.

Well now you come to mention it, maybe the support for this idea isn't so large. However, I do remember searching around quite a few newsgroups and forums when I wrote it, and this seemed a fairly common response. e.g.
http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?s...200001@ppp-spk-382.icehouse.net&output=gplain

By the way chronon, the java applets on your website all fail to load on my browser,

Thanks for telling me about that, it seems that different browsers look for the code in different places, and I've attempted to deal with this now.

 

[JesseM]

Thanks for telling me about that, it seems that different browsers look for the code in different places, and I've attempted to deal with this now.

Most of them work for me now, but the http://www.chronon.org/Applets/view4.html still doesn't.

 

[Cosmo16]

thanks for the info chronon