Spooky action at an instance
A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
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Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#172> It may seem eerie to our brains, which process events sequentially, but the history of science is also littered with examples of human biases leading to bad conclusions, such as the Earth-centric model of the solar system. Slow down. Assuming that time moves in one direction is not comparable to geocentrism.
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Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
The statement is mathematically correct [0]. [0] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/142730/px-x-0-when...
We're talking about physics, not mathematics. We don't have the luxury of hand-waving away fundamental questions about the nature of the continuum. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis
Please elaborate.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#174Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was coming to say something like this. Gets to some fun conclusions - ex. paleontologists invent dinosaurs by looking for them. Another angle on it would be showing that the universe has multiple possible levels of detail - that objects behave like newtonian point masses most of the time, that digestion is replaced by a simple hunger meter when nobody's paying attention. From this direction, time's main function is c…
That would also mean that when I don't see or hear other people, they don't "exist" as physical things that can be seen or heard until I encounter a situation in which they would be. It's the same as "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" But then again, that information has to be stored somewhere right? Like, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around, sure you…
The idea is that the universe "cheats" by replacing a computationally expensive process (a tree falling, breaking into pieces, being eaten by insects, moss growing) with a series of cheaper, "good-enough" replacements, based on the level of scrutiny.
Not existing is the cheapest.
Then, broad strokes, location and orientation
Then pieces, level of decay
etc,
and moving between the layers is you spending your attention budget to force the universe to do more work.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#176There's an interesting short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang that is related to this concept.
It was the motivation for the movie arrival (though IMO is much better - the movie adds some drama that does not exist in the short story)
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's the analogy, per Sean Carroll [1]: - There seems to be a special direction "down", where things fall by default, because we live in the vicinity of an influential object in space, called Earth - There seems to be a special direction "forward in time", where things happen by default, because we live in the vicinity of an influential event in time, called Big Bang If we had stuck to the local Earth context and g…
It's difficult to see how such a hypothesis could be tested either experimentally or observationally. Sounds more like metaphysics? Stars shine until they run out of fuel, and the age of a star - the status of its fuel, the buildup of fusion products - happens as time passes. Life on planets taps into the flow of sunlight from the star (and/or the flow of heat and chemical energy from the a hot planetary core) to gen…
Well, of course not :) Entropy as direction of time just means that the chaos on the whole increases. So, to create an ordered structure, like a cell organism, the by-product is more chaos around it.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we reverse time and this implies running everything backwards in physics, do we include gravity in the set of things that are reversed? Then everything would fly off the face of the earth in reverse-time.
Gravity is a universal constant. If you reverse time, you just reverse the order of cause and effect, not what the effect is . Does that make more sense to you?
"gravity is a universal constant" contradicts Newtonian mechanics, special and general relativity.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gravity is a universal constant. If you reverse time, you just reverse the order of cause and effect, not what the effect is . Does that make more sense to you?
If we reverse time, would gravitational waves flow backwards?
yes. it's literally like playing a movie in reverse.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#180In philosophy this idea is called "hyperstition"