Re: Oldest Bible On-line

In article <Xns9C4B54403B193smk@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
jocko <jocko@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

That is precisely the puzzlement. How can it change or
oscillate at the speed of light? The fact that it does
implies mass, and mass at the speed of light is outside
current models of the Einsteinian universe.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/neutrino/


But there is an even simpler problem here I have never heard an
explanation for. Light oscillates. The mechanics as I understand
it is that light oscillates between a magnet field and an electric
field, with each in turn inducing the other. How so if light does
not experience time. Is the manifestation a consequence not of
light itself, but only an illusion seen by those for whom light
travels faster than they.

One has to be a bit careful with notions about mass. Light has
momentum because it can impart momentum to a light sail (probably
the current best method of getting up to near c velocity for
humans). One definition of mass which is predicated on how
much momentum/velocity a thing has gives light mass. It is the
definition about relationship between mass and gravity which
leads to the conclusion that light has no rest mass. I'd
be tempted to think of momentum in potential energy terms rather
than mass terms, but have to conceed that the question of how
something with no mass might be felt when it hit one challenges
common sense. It may be that it is just plain wrong to imagine
mass and energy entirely separate issues anyway, particularly
in extreme circumstances.


I wonder if time is not curved the same way space is, in
the sense that it is not infinite like we imagine, but
finite.


Time seems closely related with complex numbers. I suspect
that times relationship to space would be much clearer, if
we existed in a world which permitted direct observation of
numbers whose squares were negative. Replacing time T by
i*T' and you have in T' a spacial dimension in harmony with
the others. For any two coodinates in space-time
x^2+y^2+z^2+T'^2 is a constant. Similarly if you look at
shrodingers equation, one must multiple the derivative of
the wave function with respect to time, by i to form an
identity with the second derivative of the wave function
with respect to space. In lay english with some
handwaving, the way that the wave function changes over
time, is related to i * the way that wave functions change
over space itself changes over space.

In math we can create all sorts of useful abstractions we
cannot intuitively visualize. We can do the math for
10-dimensional space; we haven't a clue as to how to really
visualize anything beyond the 3 dimensions we know and live
in. The math takes us quite outside our experience of
existence. The interesting thing about imaginary numbers is
that things we experience always end up fitting into real
numbers, so we don't know if the imaginary part is just
unperceivable or whether its just a useful math trick for
simplifiying descriptions of phenomena. In any event, i
worked miracles in transforming math and science.

Certainly did, and complex numbers do make sense in our universe
as mathematics of rotation, rather than arithmetic. Quaternions
which extend the complex plane to yet one more dimension are
little known but also highly relevant to physics.

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

But complex numbers have such strong properties that it is very hard
to imagine that they are not in some sense descriptions of real things
that we understand poorly if at all.

e^(ix) = cos(x) + isin(x)

was proven before anyone had grasped that complex numbers could be
explained as rotations about an axis. It is not impossible to imagine
that someone one day will suddenly say "I know what sqrt(-1) means"
and so extend our understanding in the same way that the person who
first said this about -1 did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_formula



Time and space are both curved by changes in velocity.
Indeed there are some astonishing relationships between
time and space. Throw a ball and the curve it naturally
takes we ascribe to gravity. But it happens to also be the
exact curve which from the balls perpective causes time to
run at its fastest. That ball in the air looks like it
curves but in space-time it travels the shortest distance
between two points -- because other paths would slow time
making the distance longer. Our time runs more slowly than
that ball, because of the effect of gravity, or
equivalently because we are denied the ability to travel
the ideal straight path through space-time because of the
ground beneath our feet.

Right. That's what Einstein's theory was all about. But
while I can crudely imagine space of the universe as being
finite and bounded as a surface of existence, it seems for
some reason difficult to imagine time as finite. It's as if you had a
number system at which negative infinity = postive infinity
-- sort of like a sphere in which the farthest point from a
location in one direction is the farthest point from that
location in the opposite direction.


It is not so hard to imagine time finite if one thinks of it not
as an independent property but a property interchangable with
space in space-time. And mental games such as imagining that
time slows by half every second, make it easy to imagine time
never ending for those within it, while for those outside of
this distortion, all within it would never experience that second
second tick. It is this sort of argument which has people
entering a black hole never vanish as they more and more slowly
approach the event horizon, while for those actually doing the
entering time seems to run normally, and they exist (if not live)
through the crossing of that event horizon.

Personally I think we make a big error in focusing so much on
appearances and so little on the actual observed reality. In
most frameworks of common sense, it is recognised that appearances
can be disceptive... why not science. So for example I argue that
the speed of light is not the limiting factor that most think it.
If I want to travel a distance of 10 light years in 1 year, I can
certainly do that. The glitch is that that one year must the year
as experienced by the one doing the travelling.. not the people
watching his speed from the ground. Measuring velocity any way
but from the distance I have to cross how much time will it take
"ME" to cover that distance seems to me to be silly. But that
is what happens when the people on the ground say I'll arrive in
20 of their years and so have to them a speed c/2 or whatever
example actually fits the actual relativity equations.

Again here time and space are hard to compartmentalise. Is it that
my time is slowing down which permits the crossing so much faster,
or is it that space is compressing, making the distances between
points seem closer at high velocity speeds. The two are different
descriptions of the same underlying behaviour.


Singularities and infinities are interesting limits of our
symbolic language. Is infinity squared greater than
infinity? Not a real question -- just something that
explores the limits of what we're trying to describe.


Very much a real question. If one can form a mapping from one
infinity to another they are considered the same.. however if one
cannot the infinities have different conceptual sizes.

the set of x^2 has the same infinite size as the set of x. Why: because
I can create a one to one relationship with the individual members of
the set of x^2 with the individual members of x... specifically map
x to x^2. So the infinities have the same size. However there are
infinitely many real numbers between any two integers.. there is no
mechanism to map integers to reals. There is however a mechanism to
map integers to rational numbers so the set of integers has the same
infinite scale as the set of rationals. Georg Cantor I think was the
first to work this sort of thing out.

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

But we have overlearned it and overvalued it. Our human
minds, when facing the future act as complex calculating
machines making complex predictions based on extremely
limited personal experience and information. We exaggerate
our own knowledge, are hugely biased by personal quirks
that (almost invisible to us) distort our rational
evaluation, and in the face of complexity give credence to
simplistic notions of friends that we trust. (See Stumbling
on Happiness for a much clearer picture of processes at
work.) And we end up consistently making very flawed
judgments about the future.

By Patrick Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist?

Yes. Not a great book, but very interesting with some
practical insight into why people consistently make some of
the mistakes they do. The mind is a wonderful computer,
amazing efficient at creating compelling and useful visions
of reality -- so good we do not genreally realize we are
using processed and digested information. And one part of its
function is to guess and project the future -- near term and
far. It guesses so shrewdly much of the time that sometimes
that we completely forget its a calculated guess. And
sometimes we guess with faulty information and processing and
make huge mistakes. If we are unaware we are guessing, we are
repeatedly puzzled when we're wrong again and again as we
make the same bad guesses.


Which is why I think it constructive to try to move away from the
question "what will result" towards the question "is what I am
doing right now, justified right now". Asking how is this going
to harm the past seems more conservative than asking how it might
profit the future.. Asking what can go wrong, seems sounder than
asking what can go right. Also, asking about how something harms
the past, poses the question in a format that places no boundary
on the length of time considered.. invariably when asking what
can go right, we are looking so far ahead, and no further. The
day the US invaded Iraq, it set precidents, that invasion itself
became part of history.. the day after it could never ever after
be a universe in which the US had not invaded Iraq. Likewise
the torture.. whatever short term benefit people might have
imagined it served, one has to ask did the US society want to
go into futures with their human rights posture so compromised
as consequence of US disregard for human rights when that suited
the powers within the US that then were.

To what extent might law, codified over eons serve as a
play book for what collectively we've come to label acting
rightly and what wrongly. What tools best guide well? Is
the notion that one should seek to love others and put
their interests at least equal to ones own such a bad
approach to take? And is not law a balanced thing which
seeks to say the harm others may not legally do you, is the
same harm that you may not legally do others?

There are both moral and social wisdom in those laws -- moral
in the sense of being laws about what brings worth and
meaning to human life, social in the sense they contain
wisdom about how to exist in cohesive communities rather than
isolated wandering. In modern ages, communities have
become enormously larger than in remote times. At the current
size, it's not clear if glue that advanteously binds
civilization is sufficient to contain the forces of
self-interest that tend to tear it apart. Things like global
warming are a problem for earth based civilization, but the
institutions available to deal it are the ones based on
regional self interest. We human tend to overestimate and
over value our own pain while simultaneously underestimating
and undervaluing the pain of others. We screamed in total
anquish about the loss of lives in 9/11, but hardly blinked
when we unleashed orders of magnitude more hell on the Iraqi
civilians for no good reason. Humans -- not the best
handiwork of God.

Which again is why I think a framework that tries to answer
absolute rights and wrongs, better than one which makes everything
relative. Should we catch all the fish in the sea; absolutely not,
that would be incredibly dumb. To me that is sufficient grounds
for any sane person not to do this; however, if each asks only
what is good for themselves, the fishermen want to catch fish
and I want to eat fish, and somehow the fish goes without any
voice whatsoever. Might be misunderstood, but I think we need
to move away from viewing problems from the human perspective
and instead imagine we are trying to solve the same problem
but from the perspective of God's ruling on what was to be
labelled good, and what a sin.

Ian

.

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