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Time as a Dimension & Quantum Mechanics

  • 30-01-2021 5:53pm
    #1
    roosh
    Registered Users Posts: 2,552 ✭✭✭


    I recently watched this video by Sabine Hossenfelder

    in which she discusses the question of whether time is real or not, and whether a final, fundamental theory will include time. At the beginning of the video she mentions the well established idea that time is a dimension.


    I've set out my own position on time in a number of threads on here, but mostly in relation to issues I perceive with the "block universe" interpretation of Einsteinian relativity. My question here is very much related to that, but is more focused on the compatibility of the idea of time as a dimension with quantum mechanics.


    The [perceived] issue might be attributable to my preconceptions about what it meas for time to be a dimension. Hopefully, by setting out what my understanding is someone might be able to point out where my mistake is - or the unlikelier scenario, confirm my intuition :D.


    My understanding of the idea of "time as a dimension" is that bodies are extended in the dimension of time, similar to how they are extended in the three dimensions of space. That would mean that either the past or future state of a body, or both, must co-exist with the present state of that object, in the overall structure of the Universe.


    Firstly, is that a correct interpretation of "time as a dimension" or is there an alternative interpretation.


    If it is correct, would quantum mechanics be compatible with the co-existence of future states of bodies such as experimenters and measuring apparatus? My thinking is that the existence of future states of bodies would contradict free will and quantum indeterminacy.


Comments

  • #2
    oriel36
    Registered Users Posts: 462 ✭✭oriel36


    Timekeeping is a cultural heritage rather than some quantity that Victorian mathematicians tried to make it out to be. Timekeeping went from a cultural tool based on the daily and annual cycles of the Earth to being a weapon in the hands of early 20th century mathematicians when they organised a narrative around Newton's idiosyncratic expression of a timekeeping facility called the Equation of Time as absolute/relative time-

    "Absolute time, in astronomy, is distinguished from relative, by the equation of time. For the natural days are truly unequal, though they are commonly considered as equal and used for a measure of time; astronomers correct this inequality for their more accurate deducing of the celestial motions...The necessity of which equation, for determining the times of a phænomenon, is evinced as well from the experiments of the pendulum clock, as by eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter." Principia

    It is much easier to demonstrate the development of timekeeping across thousand of years using the original expressions and references rather than contend with recent conceptions which mistake timekeeping for time. Mathematicians who did attempt to check the excesses of their colleagues had to do so in an imaginative manner-

    https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427391-600-alices-adventures-in-algebra-wonderland-solved/


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