QM/GR Wrong about Nature of Time?

[Trenton]

The 'objection' (though really too strong a term) is to the language. The opportunities for ambiguity abound. It is not to the credit of any discipline (in my view) to have terms that serve to lock out the un-initiated. The word 'curved' is a case in point. It is seductive in that people think they know what it means. As they learn more they realize their ability to go forward depends on their ability to set well established meanings aside; In other words to un-learn.

Anyway I did not know that there was no concept of gravitiational potential. I thought there was and that time dilation was (at least broadly) proportional to it. I suppose I should not be surprised as there is no concept of force, only of acceleration.

One hears various statements. I heard that 'light falls at the same rate as matter' on Patrick Moore's 700th episode of the sky at night. I took this to mean that a dot formed on a target by a laser perpendicular to the gravitational field would drop normal to said field by the same distance that an object would in the time the light would take to go from the source to the target. I wondered if this was the case as I have also heard that Newton also predicted light would be deflected but that his prediction was exactly half that predicted by GR, which has as we know has been proven by experiment. Somewhere in these two statements, there must be either an untruth or an ambiguity?

I have also heard that GR is a refinement to the laws of physics. Indeed only an extension to SR allowing it to be applied to all frames of reference rather than just inertial frames. Of the two, SR was more radical as it introduced time dilation thereby turning Newtonian mechanics on its head. As far as I know, apart from time dilaion, SR/GR just explains things differently rather than invalidate. Force as the product of mass and acceleration is still perfectly valid, even at relativistic velocities, as long as the Lorentz term is included in the equation.

Perhaps I should listen less to the conclusive sounding statements and read more of the underlying math. But on the other hand physicists are human, just like the clergy. Humans have belief systems that cause them to interpret things around them in such a way as to reinforce their beliefs. For me, learning of the belief system was a game changer that explained a great deal about how wars occur for example. Questioning statements made by humans (including yours truly) about anything is only an asymtope to rigor but it is the best we have got. Math in the pure sense might be immune to the potholes of our minds but what of the definitions of the terms in the equations?

 

[rexrino]

Dark Energy could be like glass. If glass is presented in such a way as to fool the observer, they may be physically influenced by the glass when they run into it. Yet, some forms of energy can pass through it. Perhaps not completely but enough to fool me.

 

[Stoonroon]

In the same context as the other quotes from Smolin (on p. 257, in The Trouble With Physicis) he wrote: "Motion is frozen, and a whole history of constant motion and change is presented to us as something static and unchanging." Evidently, he is referring to the common relativistic notion of "block time," aptly characterized by Paul Davies as follows: "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." (Scientific American, Sept. 2002, p. 42.)

A closely related enigma is that of time's ever-forward direction, which is enigmatic because of the contrast with our favorite mathematical laws, as Roger Penrose writes, "All the successful equations of physics are symmetrical in time. They can be used equally well in one direction in time as in the other. The future and the past seem physically to be on a completely equal footing." (Emperor's New Mind, p. 302.) The latter characteristic is often referred to as time reversal invariance. Pondering such questions back in 1963, Feynman speculated that, "It might turn out that although we did not realize it, there [exists], as a matter of fact, a time-reversal violator...It could well be that we are missing something." (The Nature of Time, ed., Gold, 1967, p. 186.)

In this Forum, with regard to the flow of time, rexrino has inquired, "Flowing where? What is the force that directs this flow?" Feynman's and rexrino's questions may be regarded as the same. I would suggest that the force may be gravity, and that we have overlooked this as a possible answer because we have never probed falling objects that are allowed to fall radially toward each other without ever colliding. (As in the "hole to China" thought experiment.")

Trenton's concern about gravitational time dilation and gravitational potential also tie into the argument, because the frozen, "block time" view predicts that the rate of a clock at the center of the large mass would be a local minimum (corresponding to a minimum potential "well".) But nobody knows for a fact whether the clock at the center actually has the slowest rate, just as nobody knows whether a test object harmonically oscillates in the hole. These are untested assumptions. Possibly, an empirical test of these assumptions would reveal that the rate of a clock at the center is actually a local maximum, corresponding to a test object trajectory that does not pass the center. If this were the case, then we would have found the thawing of time: Time only increases because matter and space also only increase. Many objections may be leveled against this idea. But, I doubt they will have empirical backing in the domain in question: the centers of gravitating bodies. This is a huge blindspot, a huge physical domain where we have not yet looked, as argued in the paper in the following link:

http://astroreview.com/issue/2011/article/the-direction-of-gravity

Accelerometers never cease to tell us that the direction of gravity is upward, not downward. We are way overdue to test the downward-gravity hypothesis by conducting the interior solution gravity experiment described in the above paper. By doing so, we may also unveil the mystery of time’s arrow and find that frozen time, like frozen matter, is a grand illusion.

 

[Trenton]

Another way of viewing the 'following of the geodisic' would be to state that acceleration was always toward regions with slower time - or to use the convention that the direction of gravity is upward, that the direction of gravity is toward regions of faster time. But having said this, I throw it open as a question - Am I having language problems again?

I have yet to have a definitive response regarding the matter of gravitational time dilation and gravitational potential and don't have resources to conduct the experiment myself. Nor it seems do I have an abundance of cognitive resources! I am still stuck trying to understand how to deploy a system of co-ordinates that puts the velocity of an in-falling object at c when it reaches the schwartzchild radius. I am having even more problems finding a system of coords that has the schwartzchild radius moving outward at c.

I keep coming up with a velocity of c but only as measured in the object's local time - not with respect to either the object's origin or to the center of the black hole. Is anyone else having this problem?

 

[ZapperZ]

Thread locked pending moderation.

I will remind everyone of the https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=414380" that you had agreed to. Pay particular attention to our policy on speculative posts, and also the type of references that are acceptable.

Zz.