Universe and Time

[size=150]Universe and Time.[/size]

One of the basic facts of our life is that the future looks different from the past. But under a cosmological point of view this asymmetry of time is perhaps only a local phenomenon.

The universe looks somehow not as it should. That sounds strange when one considers that cosmologists have little to compare with. How do we know how the universe should look like? Nevertheless, we have developed over time a strong sense of what is „natural“, and the surrounding universe does not meet this claim. Mind you, the standard cosmological model describes - more or less successfully - the consistence of the universe and how the universe develops. Approximately 14 billion years ago the universe was hotter and denser than the interior of a star. Since then the space has been expanding, cooling, and losing density. Although this model explains virtually any observation made so far, but a number of unusual properties, especially of the early universe, suggests to us that we do not yet fully understand the development of the universe.

Perhaps there is symmetry of time in our universe.

What does “symmetry of time” mean? :-k

“Symmetry of time” means that past and future are symmetric.

The rules of physics - the basic laws of physics - are time-symmetric. They apply to forward and backward running time equally. So the past and the future have to be the same.

We experience time as asymmetric. We say that In our universe the time of an ordered initial state to a disordered final state.

The time asymmetry violates the basic laws of physics. Perhaps the asymmetry of time is just a local problem.

I can think of one reasonable ways of re-phrasing this (there are probably more):

“The time asymmetry violates what we think are the laws of physics.”

But I hear the kind of phrasing you used all too often, and I don’t think I’m being pedantic by bringing it up – I think many people read that and do take it completely literally.

Reality doesn’t violate the real laws of physics; that’s pretty much a tautology. If what we think are the laws of physics don’t accurately describe reality, it is our thoughts which violate reality, not reality which violates our thoughts.

I’m having to guess, but it seems that you are saying that someone is perceiving or defining “time” as a measure of decay…??

In my world:
Time ≡ the measure of relative change.

I don’t really see “symmetry” having anything to do with it.

[size=114]Reversal of causality.[/size]

Probably you know what that means.

What about the arrow of time?

[i]"The past is different from the future. One of the most obvious features of the macroscopic world is irreversibility: heat doesn’t flow spontaneously from cold objects to hot ones, we can turn eggs into omelets but not omelets into eggs, ice cubes melt in warm water but glasses of water don’t spontaneously give rise to ice cubes. We remember the past, but not the future; we can take actions that affect the future, but not the past (we can’t undo our mistakes). We are all born, then age, then die; never the other way around. The distinction between past and future seems to be consistent throughout the observable universe. The arrow of time is simply that distinction, pointing from past to future.

Why is there such an arrow?

Irreversible processes are summarized by the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the entropy of a closed system will (practically) never decrease into the future. It’s a bedrock foundation of modern physics.

What’s “entropy”?

Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. A nice organized system, like an unbroken egg or a neatly-arranged pile of papers, has a low entropy; a disorganized system, like a broken egg or a scattered mess of papers, has a high entropy. Left to its own devices, entropy goes up as time passes."[/i] - Sean Carroll.
Do you believe in Sean Carroll’s point of view?

For those who don’t want to read Carroll’s texts:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvFFNkg7Mvo[/youtube][youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaiuZev4RWE[/youtube]

Do you agree with him?

The laws of physics are always thoughts, thus: what we think. That is tautological.

No.

Entropy is conserved in the same sense that energy is conserved, and actually for the same reason.

In a “closed energy system” we say that “energy is conserved”, because that is what “closed” means.
We never talk about a “closed entropy system” because… They don’t. The average amount of entropy throughout the entire universe per volume is a constant.

So his “Arrow of Time” is merely an “Error of Mind”.

Given a system of a particular entropic state, the highest probability will be that its entropy will not change - UNLESS there exists something to change it - either higher or lower. It really is just tautological rhetoric that confuses people into thinking that they have said something profound.

On average, non-life forms fall into higher entropy, because life IS the complex (macroscopic) effort into anentropy. But even on the subatomic level, particles form “all by themselves” into anentropic, “stable” particles. When a particle begins to form, it “freezes the chaos” and for an instant is anti-entropic. That behavior is due to the “MCR”, Maximum Rate of Change.

The universe has a maximum possible rate of changing (which is why the speed of light is a constant). Any chaos (or entropic forces) that try to exceed that MCR, only make it stronger. A particle grows because chaos wouldn’t leave it alone. Once established, chaos can’t get rid of it.

The idea that all things fall to entropy is an exaggeration and certainly not fundamental to physics or the universe.

The Eternal Universe - An Ocean of Motion.

It’s NOT “his” arrow of time, because the concept of the arrow of time has been existing since the 1920’s.

Interesting. Would you mind going into details?

I edited in a link, did you see it? I wrote that long ago (wasn’t my best), but I can go into any extreme of detail concerning any part of (I think).

"The Never End.

That is how your universe got here and how the other distant universes are forming. And as this universe dissipates from its initial explosion to become extremely thin in mass density, the whole process is already reoccurring elsewhere, fore the attraction effects never really stop - ever. Every new cluster of galaxies forms in its own vast segment of space from its own Big Bang. Infinity is a very, very large place.

It is all an eternal dynamic process that never began and will never end. The larger infinite beginningless and endless universe view is that of clouds forming until rain drops fall upon the surface of an endless ocean that in turn generates more clouds. Each splash is another Big Bang and to us, an entire universe." - JSS
To you there is no end of the universe. And what about the time? Can you imagine that there is a backward running time? Can you imagine that there is a reverse of cause and effect, so that there is at first the effect and at last the cause?

Somewhere in the universe there probably is such a reverse. The arrow of time is what we experience - perhaps wrongly experience -, and the arrow of time as the experienced asymmetric time violates the basic laws of physics. What’s wrong?

[list][list][list][list][list][list][list]1.) Our laws of physics,
2.) our experience of the arrow of time,
3.) our laws of mathematics,
4.) our thoughts,
5.) some of them,
6.) all of them,
7.) nothing.[/list:u][/list:u][/list:u][/list:u][/list:u][/list:u][/list:u]

No.

I would have to think about it more, but I’m pretty certain that there is no combination of changes that you could make that would cause a given state of the universe to roll backwards in time, even a small limited universe.

It is kind of an interesting problem, part of which would involve reversing the following;

To reverse that occurrence, one would have to reverse the vector of the photon and also reverse absolute infinity with absolute zero. The vacuum of space would become solid and mass would be a hole in that solid. And also if you did that, “2+2” would equal “0” and “2-2” would equal “4”. And that wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that it would reverse distance addition. If you added the distance between A and B twice, you would have less distance than what is between A and B. And that would then require that you defy logic itself such that “A = !A”. And by making “A = !A”, the photon is everything but the photon. If the photon is everything but the photon, then the photon isn’t running backwards. But that is okay because running backwards is not running backwards (A=!A).

So in the long run, I suspect that an attempt to reverse time would reverse the attempt to reverse time and yield nothing.

Thus, no, I don’t believe that there can ever be any region of space wherein time is reversed. Logic cannot be used against itself (else it wasn’t logic to begin with). What we experience as the “real laws of physics” is the only possible way it can ever be anywhere at any time.

What is being called “The Arrow of Time” (whoever labeled it) is merely the effect of logic itself and can never be altered. But that is a slightly different issue than entropy reversal.

So I guess that means;
4.) our thoughts - is the problem. Once logic is fleshed out concerning physical existence, there is a total lack of alternatives. No universe can be any other way (except its current state, which must always be different).

Interesting, James. But if our thoughts are merely the problem, then it is difficult to say, that our laws of physics and especially our laws of mathematics are no problem because laws of physics and laws of mathematics are products of our thoughts, and we really don’t know with safety whether the laws of physics and the laws of mathematics reflect the realitiy or not and whether the reality is “really” real or not. :exclamation: :-k :bulb:

We have the subject-object-dualism. In order to overcome the subject-object-dualism Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) established his existence-philosophical concept “In-der-Welt-Sein” (“To-Be-in-the-World”) as an existential of human beings’ “Dasein”, as a human existence in the world.

Sounds like a good reason to get “our thoughts” in order, doesn’t it? :sunglasses:

If you get the thoughts straight (form a consistent, comprehensive, and relevant ontology), the proposed laws of logic, mathematics, and physics will be the accurate laws of logic, mathematics, and physics, right? But if you merely got the laws of physics right, how would you know if your thoughts are still eschewed? And the thoughts being eschewed leaves you with not even knowing whether the laws were right. You end up searching past what you were looking for.

Heidegger was a serious thinker (despite looking like a demonic psychiatrist). I’ll give him that credit along with many of that era, but with a little perspective, you have to realize that they were “breaking ground” and not entirely coherent yet in their thoughts. The object/subject dualism is not really a very complicated issue to resolve and is actually a bit irrelevant other than removing potential confusion concerning what is really going on. Once one gets his thoughts straight on what the conscious mind is and fundamentally how it works, it becomes sort of an “Oh okay, no big deal”. The fantasies of days past fade into memories of youthful, misguided musings, (“womanly”).

For example, Einstein described time as “how fast one clock turns relative to another”. That is more or less right but can be a little misleading. Time doesn’t really have anything to do with what clocks do or don’t do. He could have said that “time is the measure of relative change”. That is a more fundamental and universal truth. But no doubt, the question was relatively new to him and his response was understandable and not really wrong, just not totally precise - yet.

It seems that the world wants to stop all thought at the “enlightenment era” as though all truth to be found was found and is irrefutable, “YOU can’t know anything THEY didn’t already know!!”. Well sorry, but “Homey don’t play that game”. They were in an “Enlighten-ing Era” but never really woke up before wandering off into dreams and fantasies of world conquest and are now dreaming of their glory - “day-dreaming” as the evening fades to night.

Get the thoughts straight (a proper ontology) and everything gets straight (and pretty quickly).

I beg to differ slightly, James.

You are giving the impression that the change predates time but i see it otherwise.
As far as i am able to think, no event can take place without time being existed in the first place.
I see time as a form of matter, while your concept of time is totally imaginary because it exists only in our mind, not in real world.

What we see aound as as space is time, in different densities, both materialized and unmaterialized, and that includes the dark matter too.

with love,
sanjay

…[size=85]love to make them beg[/size]… :evilfun:

No. A measure is “a distinguishable difference”, not “a measuring”. You are thinking of the actual measuring process being after the changing took place. I am talking about the “amount of difference in the changing” is what we call “time”. The amount of difference in changes occurs at the same moment as the changes occur.

Well, make a coherent ontology out of that, and I will consider its usefulness. :sunglasses:

I agree with that.

I agree with that too but with one caveat.

This MCR is not uniform or fixed accross the universe but tends to differ according to the density of time particles in that particular zone. As a submarine has to put more energy in denser water to move forward than thinner water, in the same way, events tend to take more time to happen in denser time zone than thinner time zone.

It menas that if there would be any inhabitance in the universe, except earth, in any such planet, which mass is 100 times to the earth ( quite possible), or even moving 100 times more speed than the earth in its orbit ( again possible), events would have to happen quite slowly there to our perception. In other words, we can also say that if someones like humans would be living there, their life span may be easily 10 mines more than us, if not 100 times more.

That is precisely what happens to a space traveller in a very fast moving spaceship. As he his moving very fast, thus he has to go trough manytime more time particles than a person on the earth, and his life becomes slow than others.

with love,
sanjay

The object/subject dualism is not really a very complicated issue to resolve?

That “MCR” doesn’t ever change with the density of any water. It is 100% “uniform”, “universal”.
And there is no such thing as a “particle of time”.

It would take a whole lot more than merely 100 times, but yeah, they would appear to us differently than we would appear to them. But the speed of the relative entropy (aging) might not change at all, or it might. That is actually a different issue. Time =/= Entropy.

That’s not really why.

?? Do you think it is??