Earth at the center of the Universe?

[surreptitious57]

Either space OR time is physically real but not both. Either space is relative to time or time is relative to space but to suggest that both
are relative to each other leaves us is an ontological limbo. What I am saying is that space time has nailed its colours to the wrong mast
by making time relative to space and it does this by spatialising time out of existence. The Minkowski block universe makes no metaphysical distinction between past present and future which is why QM makes no sense. However if we instead make space relative to time then we at
least are making it relative to something which we know is physical

I shall put this to the physicists over at Science Forums to see what they think of it
I rather suspect that they will disagree with you though I could of course be wrong

[Obvious Leo]

Obviously at that time, no one had the wherewithal to point out that non-existence can never exist as a component of an ontology.

I know the history of this era very well indeed and it wasn't so much that nobody had the wherewithal to straighten these blokes out with a few basic facts. What happened was that physics immediately became a mathematical game and the philosophers were too mesmerised by the mathematical virtuosity of the geeks to realise that they'd ventured way beyond their domain of expertise. In fact Henri Poincare, the true father of modern relativity theory as well as a deeply insightful philosopher, could see it right away and declared SR to be bollocks from the outset. Even Einstein himself had deep reservations about what Minkowski had done but because he was only a mediocre mathematician himself he felt he had little choice but to go along with it. He knew the theory was incomplete but felt sure that it would all come out in the wash in due course. A hundred years later we're still waiting because the sad fact is that the science of physics doesn't work that way. Physics is all about model-building and once a viable model has been constructed it's a simple matter to tack bits onto it as required, as Ptolemy showed with his epicycles.

Nowadays SR is regarded as a special case of GR in the so-called "flat space", even though every man and his dog knows that there's no such thing as a "flat space" anywhere in the physical universe. But what exactly is a "flat space"? A "flat space" is a space where time passes at a constant speed because this is the assumption which Minkowski was working with and this is the very space in which QM is modelled. Therefore QM and GR can never be made compatible before hell freezes over and QM without GR will never make a lick of sense. The Minkowski block quite literally and emphatically denies the most fundamental of metaphysical first principles by claiming that TIME DOES NOT PASS.

Well I've got news for Hermann in the form of vanishing hair, creaky joints and missing teeth which are telling me a different story. Time passes all right and it's passing too bloody fast for my liking.

In those days, they had no idea why light traveled at the particular speed that it does and what would happen if that speed somehow changed.

In fact Maxwell never really thought of the speed of light as a speed through space at all but rather as a dimensional constant relating to the speed of a process. This was a full century before the modern science of information theory so this was a very insightful piece of thinking. In a spaceless universe the speed of light can be very simply defined as the processing speed of the universe, i.e. the speed at which reality is being MADE.

Today it all seems to be merely a mind game for the masses, intentionally obfuscated and twisted for intrigue, but still taught in universities as true science.

I don't see the intrigue that you seem to be seeing. What I see is a deep flaw in the peer-review system of modern academia which specifically encourages group-think, excessive fragmentation of the science into sub-disciplines which are fiercely protective of their fiefdoms, and a blind unwillingness to acknowledge the self-evident truth that spacetime itself is a bullshit paradigm. None of this is helped by a few media sluts who love getting on the telly and telling everybody what a staggeringly complicated thing the universe is and aren't we lucky that the dumb fucks like us have got such geniuses as them to figure it all out for us. All I can say is that in the last hundred years they haven't got very far so maybe the dumb fucks know something that they don't. Maybe time is exactly what it appears to be.

[JSS]

I shall put this to the physicists over at Science Forums to see what they think of it
I rather suspect that they will disagree with you though I could of course be wrong

You can't expect scientists to be able to validly comment on philosophical or ontological issues. That is like asking a car mechanic to comment on the validity of thermodynamics. Scientists are technicians, very talented with their tools, but usually senseless about what it is that they are really looking at. Scientists are certainly NOT at the top of the mountain of understanding (despite recent worship promotions).

[Obvious Leo]

I can accept the physicality of space more than I can the physicality of time.

And yet time has physical properties whereas space does not. If time is not physical then neither is gravity.

This is because space has dimensions to it in a way which time does not.

A dimension is a mathematical co-ordinate system and nothing more. This is basic mathematical philosophy.

Maybe why the block universe model makes zero sense is that human beings cannot exist in a world devoid of the temporal references of past and present and future. This is because we use such references as physical coordinates in the same way we use physical coordinates of space. If we how ever had zero concept of the passing of time then the block universe model would make perfect sense. But because we are effectively hard wired to perceive time as something with physical coordinates this is why that model not only makes no sense but is too counter intuitive to even be seriously contemplated. For in purely practical terms how could human society function without any reference to the the concepts of past and present and future? It would be simply impossible

On the other hand maybe the block universe makes no sense because it's bullshit.

I shall put this to the physicists over at Science Forums to see what they think of it
I rather suspect that they will disagree with you though I could of course be wrong

I'm absolutely certain that they'll disagree with me but they do so while standing on very shaky ground. They're still working with models which are mutually exclusive and haven't made any sense for a century. However I'm well aware of the ferocity with which they're willing to defend them.

Let me ask you a question. Do you reckon that it would be possible for you to traverse the entire universe in a single lifetime if only you could build a spaceship fast enough? If SR is a physical model of reality then this is an inescapable conclusion which can be drawn from it, and what's more when you come back from your voyage the Milky Way galaxy will long before have died of old age. If you believe that this is physically possible then I have an Eiffel tower for sale which you may be interested in buying. It's hardly been used and I could let you have it at a very reasonable price.

[JSS]

The Minkowski block quite literally and emphatically denies the most fundamental of metaphysical first principles by claiming that TIME DOES NOT PASS.

I don't think that is what Minkowski meant with his block universe concept. He proposed that the universe can be thought of as a block that includes past, present, and future, much like a film reel wherein the present is just one particular frame in the middle of the reel and always moving toward the end of the reel (even though there is no actual end) - the "Arrow of Time". Or perhaps the idea of a stack of pictures in a block wherein each picture is a moment in time starting at the bottom and stacking up toward the top of the stack. The present is shifting up the stack.

Time is the measure of relative change. Einstein knew that much, although didn't say it so succinctly. As long as there is change, there is necessarily "time passage" - a sequence of changes.

In fact Maxwell never really thought of the speed of light as a speed through space at all but rather as a dimensional constant relating to the speed of a process. This was a full century before the modern science of information theory so this was a very insightful piece of thinking. In a spaceless universe the speed of light can be very simply defined as the processing speed of the universe, i.e. the speed at which reality is being MADE.

The speed of light is what it is due to the fact that one can never progress to infinity even at infinite speed. EMR propagation is affect making progress at infinite speed (zero impediment). But that does not mean that the affect can travel at infinite speed from point A to point B. It would have to make progress at infinite squared speed in order to travel from A to B at infinite speed. I can go into the exact details some other time. It's a bit off topic here.

[surreptitious57]

Do you reckon that it would be possible for you to traverse the entire universe in a single lifetime if only you could build a spaceship fast enough

No for the spaceship would have to be capable of travelling faster than the speed of light which is physically impossible. A photon in vacuum is the fastest thing known to exist but as the universe itself is expanding beyond light speed then even it could not traverse the universe within a single lifetime. This could only be achieved if the universe either stopped expanding altogether or only carried on expanding below light speed

[JSS]

The universe is not expanding.

[Obvious Leo]

Do you reckon that it would be possible for you to traverse the entire universe in a single lifetime if only you could build a spaceship fast enough

No for the spaceship would have to be capable of travelling faster than the speed of light which is physically impossible. A photon in vacuum is the fastest thing known to exist but as the universe itself is expanding beyond light speed then even it could not traverse the universe within a single lifetime. This could only be achieved if the universe either stopped expanding altogether or only carried on expanding below light speed

No. You've got this all wrong and this is something which the physicists will confirm. Obviously this is just a thought experiment but if SR is literally true then you can quite literally traverse the entire universe within a single lifetime by travelling at a speed LESS THAN the speed of light and you'll return to find our galaxy long dead. If you could actually travel AT the speed of light then the universe would not exist and if you could travel faster than the speed of light then you'd get home before you set off on your voyage.

My Eiffel tower has only a few tiny rust spots on it which you can hardly notice but I'm willing to discount the price by the cost of a tin of paint.

[surreptitious57]

The universe is not expanding

If the universe is not expanding then how do you explain the red shift of galaxies
How you also explain the distances between them expanding due to dark energy

[JSS]

The universe is not expanding

If the universe is not expanding then how do you explain the red shift of galaxies
How you also explain the distances between them expanding due to dark energy

The universe is certainly "made of something", but there was no Big Bang. The universe was never smaller.

Then what of red shift?

That is a bit of a longer story, but basically the "red-shift" presumed was actually a "blue shifting" unseen.

Everyone is aware of the prism effect separating the color spectrum. Empty space is not empty and has affect upon light passing through it. The light actually shifts; right, left, up, down, and all back around and around as it squirms through "empty" space (filled with affectance causing this). And with each tiny shift of the light, the blue gets shifted slightly more than the red. Through 1000 light years of travel, much of the blue has actually been shifted out of line entirely and dispersed into adjacent light such as to blend into the background. Only the red light remains visible as cogent photons.

The formerly presumed "empty space", if you could actually see ultra-minuscule EMR pulses ("Affectance") would look something like this:


As light propagates through that, the red and blue spectrums gradually drift apart.

The presumption that a moving source, the Doppler effect, was the ONLY potential cause for red-shifting was their error. But by the time someone explained it to them, they had already promoted the religious preference that the universe had a beginning and the red-shift was proof. They did the same (and still do) with the "Second Law of Thermo-dynamics", which was proven wrong more than 130 years ago by James Maxwell and probably empirically 20 times since. Today, Science is merely a mask for a new dogmatic religion and although a little, not all that much different from how the other religions got going.

[Obvious Leo]

I don't think that is what Minkowski meant with his block universe concept. He proposed that the universe can be thought of as a block that includes past, present, and future, much like a film reel wherein the present is just one particular frame in the middle of the reel and always moving toward the end of the reel (even though there is no actual end) - the "Arrow of Time". Or perhaps the idea of a stack of pictures in a block wherein each picture is a moment in time starting at the bottom and stacking up toward the top of the stack. The present is shifting up the stack.

If only it were so but this idea doesn't quite work when it's translated into QM, which is entirely predicated on SR. Everett tried to fix it with his "many worlds" idea but any philosopher worthy of the name would tell Everett to shove that idea where the sun don't shine.

Time is the measure of relative change. Einstein knew that much, although didn't say it so succinctly. As long as there is change, there is necessarily "time passage" - a sequence of changes.

Yes exactly, so why are we over-thinking this? Time, gravity and the speed of light are all metrics for exactly the same phenomenon, namely the rate of change in a physical system. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than this so physics is twisting our minds into pretzels for nothing.

It would have to make progress at infinite squared speed in order to travel from A to B at infinite speed. I can go into the exact details some other time. It's a bit off topic here.

Don't bother. Infinite speed is bad enough but infinite squared speed is the sort of bollocks which sent Georg Cantor to the funny farm.

[JSS]

so why are we over-thinking this? Time, gravity and the speed of light are all metrics for exactly the same phenomenon, namely the rate of change in a physical system. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than this so physics is twisting our minds into pretzels for nothing.

That is the "intrigue" or sensationalism that I had referred to. It is merely to create religious interest.

Infinite speed is bad enough but infinite squared speed is the sort of bollocks which sent Georg Cantor to the funny farm.

The concept of infinity^2 is perfectly valid, although I agree that there can be no infinity^2 speed. There are certainly more than infinity^2 points in space.

[Obvious Leo]

The universe is not expanding

If the universe is not expanding then how do you explain the red shift of galaxies
How you also explain the distances between them expanding due to dark energy

Too easy. The universe is merely aging and the spatial "expansion" is simply an observer effect. We know from GR that the universe is not aging at a constant speed because time passes more quickly between galaxies than it does within them. To a distant observer this differential in aging will be seen as a red-shift and furthermore this apparent spatial "expansion" will appear to be accelerating the more the light is red-shifted. So much for dark energy. However knowing that a galaxy was moving away from us 10 billion years ago isn't going to tell us much about what it's doing now. It might have merged with a thousand other galaxies over such a span of time and be on its way back by now. Who knows? The greatest truth about relativistic motion is that because of gravity the motion of every single physical entity in the universe is causally determined by the motion of every other and it is NOT causally determined by a sequence of clever equations.

[surreptitious57]

Now the red shift observed is really an increase in the wavelength of spectral lines of light following a precise
relationship to initial wavelength and to velocity that preserves the information in the original light spectrum
And the imaginary effect described previously would result in variable loss by the smearing out of features of
spectral information toward the shorter wavelength end of the spectrum. However that is not observed at all

[JSS]

Now the red shift observed is really an increase in the wavelength of spectral lines of light following a precise
relationship to initial wavelength and to velocity that preserves the information in the original light spectrum
And the imaginary effect described previously would result in variable loss by the smearing out of features of
spectral information toward the shorter wavelength end of the spectrum. However that is not observed at all

No. That doesn't describe what I said at all, just the opposite.

The spectral information displays a notable, yet speculated, lack of blue spectra. That is due to the blue being prismatically "smeared" into a background rather than maintaining a focusable point of origin. The blue gets lost from vision in the surrounding darkness, not visible as part of the star.

Stars that are far enough away also lose the red. That is what gives the impression that there are no stars past a certain distance (and prevents the sky from being totally white).