Time, quantum theory, etc

[Colin Pykett]

David asked me to join in the discussion on time, quantum theory, etc.  Two points - I do not wish to post under the topic where this request arose, so please do not move this.  I am afraid I do not claim to know the Mind Of God nearly as well as some board members apparently do, and my religious beliefs are in any case no doubt unutterably boring,  I would not inflict them on anybody.  Secondly, it's nothing whatever to do with organs, so in due course I will probably remove it again from the forum.

Re time, everyone would presumably agree that its qualia (the form of its subjective conscious experience) are highly variable - sometimes it seems to go quickly or sometimes slowly.  This differs from the more consistent and enduring nature of most other qualia such as distance (i.e. space) - a ruler always 'looks' pretty much the same length regardless of our mood, what else we might be doing, etc.  This is quite unlike time.  Over the last century or so this observation, among other things, has led to a number of interesting attempts to take time out of the subjective domain by others besides the better-known theorists such as Einstein.

J Mactaggart, a well respected philosopher, wrote a famous paper in 1908 called 'The Unreality of Time' in which he 'proved' that it could not exist.  His arguments were highly original and I think I am right in saying they have not yet been rigorously overturned despite much argument and effort.

In 1927 J W Dunne, an aeronautical engineer by trade, wrote his famous book 'An Experiment with Time' in which he claimed to have amassed evidence that his dreams contained a statistically significant amount of verifiable precognition.  He went on to propose a sort of theory to explain this (serialism) which, in crude terms, said that every experience in the past, present and future is somehow 'just all there', and that Time is merely a construct of the conscious mind to enable us to make sense of (construct a model of) our sensory inputs.  However the subconscious mind is able somehow to wander more freely among this collection of every event we have ever experienced or will experience, and it does so most frequently in dreams.  It is probably true that, while Dunne was an excellent engineer, his arguments to do with time are somewhat vague and have too many holes.  Nevertheless his book is worth reading.  Both these thinkers were pivotal to the writings of J B Priestley who was almost obsessively interested in time.  His book 'Man and Time' is a good read, if rather subjective and qualitative.

Much more recently (1999) Julian Barbour, a theoretical physicist, wrote a book called 'The End of Time' in which he proposed a qualitatively similar model to that of Dunne which he called Platonia - it contains everything in the past, present and future.  He maintains that time-independent mathematical models of the universe (and thus our existence) can be set up - and this is undoubtedly true purely at a mathematical level because they already exist.  Not all physicists go along with the totality of his ideas, though some do.  Physics seems to be polarising into the 'temporalist' and 'non-temporalist' camps to some extent.

All four books are well worth a read and require little or no mathematical effort, though Barbour's is a bit heavy going at times.

Re quantum theory, to my mind one of its strangest aspects is one which is usually missed.  All the fundamental particles of the same type are exactly the same - all electrons are identical, all protons, etc, etc.  Therefore one cannot tell them apart.  Therefore it might be the case that they are, in fact, the same particle.  I think it was Linus Pauling (can't remember) who first proposed this, and he said that only if they are all the same particle could they possibly be so identical.  Therefore, if the same particle appears to be just about everywhere all at once, it is not so surprising that a single photon can go through two slits at once and produce an interference pattern.

This all pretty deep stuff, but in the last analysis it's only necessary to develop a self-consistent theory or theories which explain things satisfactorily.  In other words, we set up models.  These are nothing to do with 'reality', whatever that is.  We only need models to make sense of what we experience. 

What all this might have to do with what is being discussed elsewhere on the forum is not for me to say, but hopefully it might be of interest.

Colin Pykett

[David Pinnegar]

Dear Colin

Thanks for this contribution. It's particularly relevant for the reason that organs make a sound that is constant. No variation of sound is, within limits, available or supposed to be permitted from a pipe. Therefore the sound of the organ leads to the eternal and the instrument has always held a fascination for those with the most complex of minds and ideas . . .

Best wishes

David P

[Colin Pykett]

One of the most profound and beautiful descriptions of the organ, to my mind, was written by Yehudi Menuhin.  Quoting from it disgracefully briefly, he said:

" ... the organ has always seemed to me an instrument of the elements, a superhuman instrument born of wind and rock, of air and shapes.  In our churches its sounds represent the disembodied voice of God ...  it links the mind of the Creator (or the Universal Mind if you prefer) with the human mind ... "

This is from his Preface to the book simply called "Organ" by Arthur Wills, one of the Menuhin Music Guides (Macdonald 1984).  I found it so astonishingly compelling when I first read it that I re-read it time and again.  It occupies about two pages and I commend it to the forum.

It is interesting that there seem to be faint echoes here of some of the ideas being tossed around at the moment on the forum.  A fascinating coincidence at the very least.  Some might read more into it?!!  Shades of Jung's Collective Unconscious perhaps? 

Let's not get too carried away though!

Colin Pykett

[KB7DQH]

his dreams contained a statistically significant amount of verifiable precognition.

And so have mine :o 

It is interesting that there seem to be faint echoes here of some of the ideas being tossed around at the moment on the forum.  A fascinating coincidence at the very least.  Some might read more into it?!!  Shades of Jung's Collective Unconscious perhaps?

Possibly...

Therefore the sound of the organ leads to the eternal and the instrument has always held a fascination for those with the most complex of minds and ideas . . .

Definitely...

Eric
KB7DQH

[David Pinnegar]

Dear Colin

Thanks so much for your post - your resource of knowledge at your fingertips is such a brilliant contribution and I had no idea of Mactaggart, Dunne and Barbour.

Last evening on a car journey I discussed with my sons the mention of ?Linus Pauling's that all fundamental particles might actually be the same particle . . . and one of them remarked that it appears that those who say that science disproves the existence of God are simply demonstrating an inadequate view of science . . . !

Importantly and relevantly to this forum, the fact that a common interest in organs on a forum can enable and permit discussion of diverse subjects, one would think must (I had better not include the word "surely" here) enable people to appreciate organs and organists to be rather more "interesting" than their conventional image.

Best wishes

David P

[Colin Pykett]

(Subsequently tidied up slightly so it reads better.  Also I very briefly allowed myself to stray into theism/atheism at the end which, on reflection, added nothing.  This has been removed.  CEP.)

One only really needs the concept of 'change', not time.  Obviously things do change around us, such as the motion of planets and all the other things mentioned.  But these do not 'require' time, they define it.  Time is an invention thought up by our minds to merely measure and quantify change in a convenient manner.  If you think about it, time is actually defined in terms of motions in space.  Time is just space-change, such as planetary motion.  Unlike space, time has no independent existence.

Once you have grasped this, you can extrapolate slightly and come to the startling conclusion that when there is no change there can therefore be no time.   In that situation time becomes superfluous and has no meaning - it does not exist because it does not need to - if nothing changes at all.  This is quite different to space - for instance a painting or photograph is a frozen, unchanging image.  We need at least two space dimensions for it to exist as a flat sheet of paper, obviously, but time is not required for it to exist.  It is an invention of the mind which is not actually necessary.  It is admittedly convenient, but an alternative physics, i.e. an alternative way of describing things, can be developed without it. 

It is on the basis of premises such as these that people such as Barbour have built their ideas of an immense container of some sort - he called it Platonia - which contains everything that has ever happened and ever will happen.  One can visualise these 'things' as snapshots in some sort of enormous void, and those who thrive on hyperdimensional space will be pleased to note that Platonia is indeed n-dimensional where 'n' is probably very large!  As sentient individuals we wander around in this void and continually encounter various 'nows'.  This is one of Barbour's favourite terms to define what most of us call a 'moment'  Each moment or 'now' is also called a Time Capsule in his hypothesis. 

However we do not just wander around blindly in Platonia.  Otherwise we would frequently encounter things which we do not encounter, such as a drinking glass which has just fallen onto the floor and shattered, suddenly putting itself back together again and jumping back onto the table.  It would be a poor hypothesis which allowed such things to be part of everyday experience when they clearly are not.

To prevent this Barbour brings in high-falutin maths.  He invokes things like Schrodinger's wave mechanics to provide an overlay of probability in Platonia which, in effect, guides our passage through the void.  Therefore very improbable things (such as the self- assembling broken glass) do not happen - or at least, not very often!  They are there in Platonia but we do not encounter them because of probability.

The interesting thing is that there has always been a version of wave mechanics which does not use time in the equations - the time-independent Schrodinger equation, and this goes right back to the 1920's.  Barbour makes much of this, and of course it is this version which he uses to generate his probabilities of what we meet in Platonia.

The suggestion has parallels with Stephen Hawking's (and others) hypothesis of the Multiverse - an infinite number of universes which together contain everything that could possibly have happened and which will happen in the future.  The two ideas - Platonia and the Multiverse - do not look all that different in pictorial, intuitive terms.   To immerse yourself in the Multiverse you will need to read yet another book - Hawking's 'The Grand Design'.

Colin Pykett

[David Pinnegar]

Dear Colin

You make a very eloquent explanation of this all.

It may be appropriate to add that the illustration of the wine glass and the mechanism by which it is prevented from reversing from its broken state on the floor is prevented in more immediately understandable physics by the concept of entropy - the measure of disorder - which always increases with "time" and can only be decreased locally by an input of energy.

Voix - I illustrated the concept of the relational aspect of the perception of time to which Colin has referred to here by way of the illustration of the stationary electron in space - http://www.organmatters.com/index.php/topic,636.msg2837.html#msg2837

Note that none of this requires the idea of a Creator, God, Allah or whatever name you prefer.  But nor does it do away with it either,

Well - perhaps there is an alternative perspective. We don't understand the nature of god other than the concept of the "ruling force" from which all is derived. Whether this is particularly personally affecting individually each one of us might be open to question and we may each understand it differently according to our observations and the perspectives we have in our interpretations. None of us can say, except as a matter of belief, how closely this matrix of detailed implications of the "ruling force" interacts with the matrix of surrounding circumstances as influences on our lives, but it is a matter of fact that we have no closer understandings either of "God" or of the real nature of the "ruling forces" from which we and all matter and all the universes derive. It seems valid to question whether there is a difference . . .

Best wishes

David P

[Colin Pykett]

It distresses me when I hear people say things like they "feel unworthy to be in the company of people who can handle and understand these huge concepts".  I hope Voix Cynique was not referring to me, but if he was,  may I point out that I only happen to be interested in these matters and have merely tried to reflect this interest here.  In any case, my intellectual toolkit only allows me to do little more than skim the surface of them myself.

We all have our pet hobbies and interests, and to those who have different ones, it might seem that we are much mightier than is the case!  I do not know who Voix Cynique is, but am sure he could bowl me over with his expertise and talents.  I have yet to meet anybody on the planet from whom I have not been able to learn anything.

Isaac Newton, who had one of the greatest minds ever, said that "I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me".  From what we know of him, he could be one of the most unpleasant of men when it suited, but he obviously had a goodly dash of humility, and this might make us more inclined to forgive him.

Colin Pykett

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

An unequally tempered lunch today with a great friend over an intermission between playing historic instruments resulted in he and his daughter sprouting nonsense poems which my equally sophisticated juvenile sense of humour found greatly entertaining, as I hope readers will here. One perked up my ears as Colin and I here had been considering whether time exists for an electron isolated in deep space:

On Space..... (play useful music as intro...)
AN infinite point out is space
Has gone missing
Leaving no trace...
No plethora - no glare -
Leaving nothing but air...
And nothing to put in its place...
Quite sad really!

;) :)


I do hope that others might enjoy this light hearted sense of humour!

Best wishes

David P