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Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion

newscientist.com

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Re: Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion

#41

Post by richardjordan »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #8
richardjordan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You either believe in natural or supernatural explanations for the universe. If you accept the latter then the discussion is moot. If you're a scientist your approach is the first. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to come up with a philosophically sound logically consistant explanation for natural phenomenon which isn't unified and connected at a fundamental level. Two incompatible sets of natural explanations ar…

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to come up with a philosophically sound logically consistant explanation for natural phenomenon which isn't unified and connected at a fundamental level. Two incompatible sets of natural explanations are vastly less likely than one unless we're falling back on superstition again. Really? Ancient philosophers argued that it's vastly less likely for there to be such a huge distance…

Those ancient theories are not philosophically and logically consistent. It's why we had the scientific revolution and the enlightenment in the first place. Because there were holes in those accounts. The degree to which Physicists are talking about inconsistencies are tiny compared to the huge holes in theories than the very primitive and simplistic ideas of the ancients.

As to your ending comment. That's the point. Without studying physics you're not going to understand the degree to which it already all plugs together very well. We would have no electronics nor satellites without an incredible level of agreement between theories and experiment supporting a tightly interconnected set of theories - they weren't going to happen with any pre-scientific revolution worldviews.

Re: Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion

#42

Post by richardjordan »

asveikau wrote: post #10
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to come up with a philosophically sound logically consistant explanation for natural phenomenon which isn't unified and connected at a fundamental level. Two incompatible sets of natural explanations are vastly less likely than one unless we're falling back on superstition again. Really? Ancient philosophers argued that it's vastly less likely for there to be such a huge distance…

> Ancient philosophers argued that it's vastly less likely for there to be such a huge distance separating celestial bodies than whatever their pet theory of the day was. Is it me or is that a bit handwavy? The Greeks or whoever else got things awfully right and other things terribly wrong. We have the benefit of hindsight so we can point at the latter category. It doesn't negate the former. Seems like you could take…

You're not comparing apples to apples when you compare ancient "theories" and modern scientific theory. Predicting that the sun will come up tomorrow, and why the sun will come up tomorrow are two very different levels of detail and granularity. The latter will have far more predictive power than the former.

No ancient theories had anything like the predictive power of modern theories, so were far less powerful. So when we talk about how the ancients had theories for this - we're talking orders of magnitude less complexity.

An analogy: when we were kids my brother took part in a guess the weight of the cake. The answer was 1.010 kg. My brother had guessed 1.005 kg and another boy had guessed 1.04 kg. They tried give it to the other kid - well his difference was "3 different" whereas my brother's was "5 different". Obviously anyone with a brain could see there was an order of magnitude difference in the precision of the two predictions.

Ancient theories are like that. Orders of magnitude less precise and therefore less predictive than modern theories. The differences tend to lead to dramatic differences in outcome making them fail to interweave in ways that are useful for us in the modern world - this is why, after all, we moved to the modern theories and they led to everything we have today.

Ancient theories didn't tend to connect in philosophically logical ways as do modern theories - this is reflected in their lack of predictive power. So when I say that the problems with tying theories together that modern physicists have are vast in our minds, but really amount to splitting hairs when we compare them to the differences between theories that preceded them, this is why.

Re: Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion

#43

Post by richardjordan »

nnq wrote: post #39
richardjordan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You either believe in natural or supernatural explanations for the universe. If you accept the latter then the discussion is moot. If you're a scientist your approach is the first. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to come up with a philosophically sound logically consistant explanation for natural phenomenon which isn't unified and connected at a fundamental level. Two incompatible sets of natural explanations ar…

> It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to come up with a philosophically sound logically consistent explanation for natural phenomenon which isn't unified and connected at a fundamental level Well, one could come up with some kind of model of "infinite complexity", different models of different aspects of the universe can never be unified because of stretches of "infinite complexity" "between them", like imagine a mo…

The problem is consistency with your approach. I am referring to theories that are consistent enough with each other to have useful predictive power. As you get bigger disconnects between theories their predictive power falls away.

Re: Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion

#44

Post by richardjordan »

tiatia wrote: post #26

"It's a visualisation of the phenomenon, it's not a proof," Genovese says of the experiment. Wow. They now have "proof" in Science. Genovese has brought the scientific method to a complete new level.

No they have proof in math. He is clearly saying it's not a proof to explain to the layman interviewing him that he shouldn't go and write some stupid headline like "physicists prove that time is just an illusion".

Re: Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion

#45

Post by richardjordan »

tehwalrus wrote: post #25

> But if a hypothetical observer existed outside the universe, when they looked in, everything would appear stationary. "when" they looked in . They who are outside time. This article gave me a headache. Maybe English isn't currently adequate to describe the ideas of a timeless universe..

Right. But most people don't read math and reporters don't write it.

Re: Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion

#47

Post by richardjordan »

wrongc0ntinent wrote: post #23
dschiptsov wrote: post #21

One universal time for everything is definitely an illusion, even guys who wrote Upanishads knew that. Each process has its own properties, to put it differently, one-time-for-it-all is just a concept of the mind and doesn't exist outside our head.

"Knew" is a big stretch there.

Agreed. Taking "ancient wisdom" too seriously and seeing it through a modern scientific lens is pretty much always too big-a-stretch to make.

Plus there's a difference between talking about psychological perception of time, as most religious texts do, and time as a measure of the evolution of physical systems in the scientific sense. Not the same thing.

Re: Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion

#48

Post by yetanotherphd »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #2

Question: Why do some physicists believe it's a problem that physics isn't unified? It seems odd to assume that just because throughout history we've unified more and more concepts that all of physics can be unified. What if there's a limit? It's interesting to think that 100,000 years from now, physicists will still be working on the problem since no one would know it's impossible.

Feynman's comments on this are related:

"People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No I am not. I am just looking to find out more about the world. And if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything so be it. That would be very nice discovery. If it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers and we just sick and tired of looking at the layers then that’s the way it is! But whatever way it comes out it’s nature, it’s there, and she’s going to come out the way she is. And therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn’t pre-decide what it is we are trying to do except to find out more about it."

http://amiquote.tumblr.com/post/2744225669/richard-feynman-o...

Re: Entangled toy universe shows time may be an illusion

#49

Post by wrongc0ntinent »

richardjordan wrote: post #47
wrongc0ntinent wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Knew" is a big stretch there.

Agreed. Taking "ancient wisdom" too seriously and seeing it through a modern scientific lens is pretty much always too big-a-stretch to make. Plus there's a difference between talking about psychological perception of time, as most religious texts do, and time as a measure of the evolution of physical systems in the scientific sense. Not the same thing.

Thanks, pretty much what I meant.
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