At Big Think: How reality is shaped by the speed of light

I agree with PM1 at 6. Even if you were travelling at the speed of light, your experience would only be of light rays that were travelling with you: light rays all over the rest of the universe would not be part of your experience. Also, if you looked behind you, as soon as you saw whatever lights rays were impinging on you at that time, the world would be black because no more light rays could catch up with you. I think Caspian didn't get this thought experiment right.Viola Lee

November 12, 2022

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Give me warp speed, Scottie........chuckdarwin

November 12, 2022

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If we could imagine moving at the speed of light (which is not actually possible for material objects), we would be decoupled from the time experienced in this physical universe. All events in the physical universe would seem to us to be happening simultaneously–we would effectively be outside of time

The second sentence is a sheer non sequitur from the first. If we could experience the universe at the speed of light, we would not experience time as we currently do -- but that does not mean that we would experience all events as simultaneous. The speed of light still takes place within time -- that's the very point of "light-year" as a measure of distance.PyrrhoManiac1

November 12, 2022

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This piece makes a big deal out of the delays in "seeing" nearby objects due to the speed of light, and how that supposedly affects how we experience reality. However, the difference in time between a photon from two metres away and another from say, ten meters away is a mere 27 ns or 0.027 us or 0.000027 ms. Given that humans have a hard time distinguishing visual events even 1 ms apart, this means that, for humans, these two arrivals are for all practical purpose, simultaneous. Thus, for normal, everyday purposes, the speed of light does not impact our reality, at least not in the visual terms discussed in this piece. Moreover, there is a significant delay between photons impinging on the retina and nerve signals reaching the brain, another delay as the visual cortex decodes and combines the signals, and a further one as the brain presents the interpreted image to the mind. Those delays are all measured in milliseconds, making the nanosecond delays from object to eye meaningless. The "reality" you observe therefore happened many milliseconds ago, making the effect of the speed of light negligible to our reality for almost all normal day-to-day activities. Not to be too mean to Adam Frank, but doesn't he have more profound things to write about?Fasteddious

November 11, 2022

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And as the newly minted, (Oct. 2022), Nobel Laureate Anton Zeilinger stated, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”

“The Kochen-Speckter Theorem talks about properties of one system only. So we know that we cannot assume – to put it precisely, we know that it is wrong to assume that the features of a system, which we observe in a measurement exist prior to measurement. Not always. I mean in certain cases. So in a sense, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.” Anton Zeilinger – Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism – video (7:17 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4C5pq7W5yRM#t=437

Thus from multiple lines of experimental evidence, (i.e. Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment with atoms, the violation of Leggett’s inequality, Quantum entanglement in time, and quantum contextuality, not to mention the Quantum Zeno effect and Quantum information theory), Einstein’s belief that “The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics” has been thoroughly, and impressively, falsified. In fact, I hold that it would now be much more appropriate to rephrase Einstein’s answer to the philosopher Rudolph Carnap in this way; “It is impossible for “the experience of ‘the now’” to ever be divorced from physical measurement, it will always be a part of physics.” Verse:

1 Thessalonians 5:21 Test all things; hold fast what is good.

Supplemental note:

Sept. 2022 - Thus in conclusion Einstein himself may not have personally believed in life after death, (nor in a personal God), but Special Relativity itself contradicts Einstein and offers stunning confirmation that Near Death Testimonies are accurate ‘physical’ descriptions of what happens after death, i.e. going to a ‘higher timeless/eternal dimension’, i.e. heavenly dimension, that exists above this temporal realm. https://uncommondescent.com/cosmology/from-iai-news-how-infinity-threatens-cosmology/#comment-765987

bornagain77

November 11, 2022

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Several years after Einstein’s heated exchange with Bergson, which resulted in Einstein failing to ever receive a Nobel prize for his work on relativity, Einstein had another encounter with another prominent philosopher,, Rudolf Carnap. In particular, and around 1935, (and on a train no less), Einstein was specifically asked by Rudolf Carnap, “Can physics demonstrate the existence of ‘the now’ in order to make the notion of ‘now’ into a scientifically valid term?”

“Can physics demonstrate the existence of ‘the now’ in order to make the notion of ‘now’ into a scientifically valid term?” – Rudolf Carnap

According to Stanely Jaki, Einstein’s answer to Carnap was ‘categorical’, he said: “The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics.”

“The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics.” – Albert Einstein Carnap and Einstein quotes are taken from the last few minutes of this video: Stanley L. Jaki: “The Mind and Its Now” https://vimeo.com/10588094

Einstein’s 'categorical. denial that ‘the experience of the now’ can be a part of physical measurement was a very interesting claim for Einstein to make since “The experience of ‘the now’ has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics, established itself as very much being a defining part of our physical measurements in quantum mechanics. For instance, the following delayed choice experiment, (that was dome with atoms instead of photons) demonstrated that, “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”

Reality doesn’t exist until we measure it, (Delayed Choice) quantum experiment confirms – Mind = blown. – FIONA MACDONALD – 1 JUN 2015 Excerpt: “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” lead researcher and physicist Andrew Truscott said in a press release. http://www.sciencealert.com/reality-doesn-t-exist-until-we-measure-it-quantum-experiment-confirms

Likewise, the following violation of Leggett’s inequality stressed the quantum-mechanical assertion “that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it.”

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality – Apr 20, 2007 Excerpt: They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell’s thought experiment, Leggett’s inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it. “Our study shows that ‘just’ giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics,” Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. “You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism.” http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640

The Mind First and/or Theistic implications of quantum experiments such as the preceding are fairly obvious. As Professor Scott Aaronson of MIT once quipped, “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists,,, But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!”

“Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists who think the world sprang into existence on October 23, 4004 BC at 9AM (presumably Babylonian time), with the fossils already in the ground, light from distant stars heading toward us, etc. But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!” – Scott Aaronson – MIT associate Professor quantum computation – Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables

Moreover, advances in quantum mechanics even goes one step further and show us, via "quantum entanglement in time", that “a decision made in the present can influence something in the past.” and, “Quantum correlations come first, space-time later.”

Physicists provide support for retrocausal quantum theory, in which the future influences the past July 5, 2017 by Lisa Zyga Excerpt: retrocausality means that, when an experimenter chooses the measurement setting with which to measure a particle, that decision can influence the properties of that particle (or another particle) in the past, even before the experimenter made their choice. In other words, a decision made in the present can influence something in the past. https://phys.org/news/2017-07-physicists-retrocausal-quantum-theory-future.html Quantum Weirdness Now a Matter of Time – 2016 Bizarre quantum bonds connect distinct moments in time, suggesting that quantum links — not space-time — constitute the fundamental structure of the universe. Excerpt: Not only can two events be correlated, linking the earlier one to the later one, but two events can become correlated such that it becomes impossible to say which is earlier and which is later.,,, “If you have space-time, you have a well-defined causal order,” said Caslav Brukner, a physicist at the University of Vienna who studies quantum information. But “if you don’t have a well-defined causal order,” he said — as is the case in experiments he has proposed — then “you don’t have space-time.”,,, Quantum correlations come first, space-time later. Exactly how does space-time emerge out of the quantum world? Bruner said he is still unsure. https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160119-time-entanglement/

And in regards to quantum entanglement in time, Professor Elise Crullis draws out the implications and provocatively states that “entanglement can occur across two quantum systems that never coexisted,,, it implies that the measurements carried out by your eye upon starlight falling through your telescope this winter somehow dictated the polarity of photons more than 9 billion years old.”

You thought quantum mechanics was weird: check out entangled time – Feb. 2018 Excerpt: Just when you thought quantum mechanics couldn’t get any weirder, a team of physicists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported in 2013 that they had successfully entangled photons that never coexisted. Previous experiments involving a technique called ‘entanglement swapping’ had already showed quantum correlations across time, by delaying the measurement of one of the coexisting entangled particles; but Eli Megidish and his collaborators were the first to show entanglement between photons whose lifespans did not overlap at all.,,, Up to today, most experiments have tested entanglement over spatial gaps. The assumption is that the ‘nonlocal’ part of quantum nonlocality refers to the entanglement of properties across space. But what if entanglement also occurs across time? Is there such a thing as temporal nonlocality?,,, The data revealed the existence of quantum correlations between ‘temporally nonlocal’ photons 1 and 4. That is, entanglement can occur across two quantum systems that never coexisted. What on Earth can this mean? Prima facie, it seems as troubling as saying that the polarity of starlight in the far-distant past – say, greater than twice Earth’s lifetime – nevertheless influenced the polarity of starlight falling through your amateur telescope this winter. Even more bizarrely: maybe it implies that the measurements carried out by your eye upon starlight falling through your telescope this winter somehow dictated the polarity of photons more than 9 billion years old. Elise Crullis assistant professor in history and philosophy of science at the City College of New York.,,, https://aeon.co/ideas/you-thought-quantum-mechanics-was-weird-check-out-entangled-time

Moroever, as if that was not provocative enough, with "quantum contextuality", (which is integral for quantum computing), we find that “In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation”

Contextuality is ‘magic ingredient’ for quantum computing – June 11, 2012 Excerpt: Contextuality was first recognized as a feature of quantum theory almost 50 years ago. The theory showed that it was impossible to explain measurements on quantum systems in the same way as classical systems. In the classical world, measurements simply reveal properties that the system had, such as colour, prior to the measurement. In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation. Imagine turning over a playing card. It will be either a red suit or a black suit – a two-outcome measurement. Now imagine nine playing cards laid out in a grid with three rows and three columns. Quantum mechanics predicts something that seems contradictory – there must be an even number of red cards in every row and an odd number of red cards in every column. Try to draw a grid that obeys these rules and you will find it impossible. It’s because quantum measurements cannot be interpreted as merely revealing a pre-existing property in the same way that flipping a card reveals a red or black suit. Measurement outcomes depend on all the other measurements that are performed – the full context of the experiment. Contextuality means that quantum measurements can not be thought of as simply revealing some pre-existing properties of the system under study. That’s part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics. http://phys.org/news/2014-06-weird-magic-ingredient-quantum.html Quantum contextuality Quantum contextuality is a feature of the phenomenology of quantum mechanics whereby measurements of quantum observables cannot simply be thought of as revealing pre-existing values. ,,, Contextuality was first demonstrated to be a feature of quantum phenomenology by the Bell–Kochen–Specker theorem.[1],,, 1. S. Kochen and E.P. Specker, “The problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics”, Journal of Mathematics and Mechanics 17, 59–87 (1967) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_contextuality

bornagain77

November 11, 2022

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First, from the point of view of the photon, time never passes for them. i.e. There is no 'past' for the photon, it is always 'now' from the point of view of the photon

Michael Strauss PhD in Particle Physics – Virtual Particles and Special Relativity https://youtu.be/l3kt-DKhlwc?t=96

Second, there was actually a heated argument between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson, (who was a prominent philosopher), over what the proper definition of time should be. Einstein bluntly stated, to an audience of prominent philosophers that he was invited to speak to, that, “The time of the philosophers did not exist”. And in fact, that disagreement with those philosophers, and with Henri Bergson in particular, over what the proper definition of time should actually be was one of the primary reasons that Einstein failed to ever receive a Nobel prize for his work on relativity:

Einstein vs Bergson, science vs philosophy and the meaning of time – Wednesday 24 June 2015 Excerpt: The meeting of April 6 was supposed to be a cordial affair, though it ended up being anything but. ‘I have to say that day exploded and it was referenced over and over again in the 20th century,’ says Canales. ‘The key sentence was something that Einstein said: “The time of the philosophers did not exist.”’ It’s hard to know whether Bergson was expecting such a sharp jab. In just one sentence, Bergson’s notion of duration—a major part of his thesis on time—was dealt a mortal blow. As Canales reads it, the line was carefully crafted for maximum impact. ‘What he meant was that philosophers frequently based their stories on a psychological approach and [new] physical knowledge showed that these philosophical approaches were nothing more than errors of the mind.’ The night would only get worse. ‘This was extremely scandalous,’ says Canales. ‘Einstein had been invited by philosophers to speak at their society, and you had this physicist say very clearly that their time did not exist.’ Bergson was outraged, but the philosopher did not take it lying down. A few months later Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the law of photoelectric effect, an area of science that Canales noted, ‘hardly jolted the public’s imagination’. In truth, Einstein coveted recognition for his work on relativity. Bergson inflicted some return humiliation of his own. By casting doubt on Einstein’s theoretical trajectory, Bergson dissuaded the committee from awarding the prize for relativity. In 1922, the jury was still out on the correct interpretation of time. So began a dispute that festered for years and played into the larger rift between physics and philosophy, science and the humanities. Bergson was fond of saying that time was the experience of waiting for a lump of sugar to dissolve in a glass of water. It was a declaration that one could not talk about time without reference to human consciousness and human perception. Einstein would say that time is what clocks measure. Bergson would no doubt ask why we build clocks in the first place. ‘He argued that if we didn’t have a prior sense of time we wouldn’t have been led to build clocks and we wouldn’t even use them … unless we wanted to go places and to events that mattered,’ says Canales. ‘You can see that their points of view were very different.’ In a theoretical nutshell this, (disagreement between Einstein and Bergson), expressed perfectly the division between lived time and spacetime: subjective experience versus objective reality.,,, Just when Einstein thought he had it worked out, along came the discovery of quantum theory and with it the possibility of a Bergsonian universe of indeterminacy and change. God did, it seems, play dice with the universe, contra to Einstein’s famous aphorism. Some supporters went as far as to say that Bergson’s earlier work anticipated the quantum revolution of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg by four decades or more. Canales quotes the literary critic Andre Rousseaux, writing at the time of Bergson’s death. ‘The Bergson revolution will be doubled by a scientific revolution that, on its own, would have demanded the philosophical revolution that Bergson led, even if he had not done it.’ Was Bergson right after all? Time will tell. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/science-vs-philosophy-and-the-meaning-of-time/6539568

Henri Bergson, as the preceding article pointed out, championed the primacy of ‘lived time’ over and above Einstein’s ‘spacetime’, Which is to say that Bergson championed ‘subjective experience’ over and above ‘objective reality’ in providing the proper definition of time. As the preceding article stated, the subjective experience of “duration”, was “a major part of his (Bergson’s) thesis on time”. In support of Bergson’s main thesis, and as Dr. Egnor has pointed out, “Duration, and/or “persistence of self identity”, is one of the main defining attributes of the immaterial mind that is irreducible to the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian atheists.

The Mind and Materialist Superstition – Michael Egnor – 2008 Six “conditions of mind” that are irreconcilable with materialism: – Excerpt: Intentionality,,, Qualia,,, Persistence of Self-Identity,,, Restricted Access,,, Incorrigibility,,, Free Will,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/11/the_mind_and_materialist_super013961.html

Likewise, J. Warner Wallace also lists “Persistent self-identity through time”, i.e. ‘duration’, as a property of the immaterial mind that is irreducible to the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian atheists.

Six reasons why you should believe in non-physical minds – 01/30/2014 1) First-person access to mental properties 2) Our experience of consciousness implies that we are not our bodies 3) Persistent self-identity through time 4) Mental properties cannot be measured like physical objects 5) Intentionality or About-ness 6) Free will and personal responsibility http://winteryknight.com/2014/01/30/six-reasons-why-you-should-believe-in-non-physical-minds/

In more clearly defining what Henri Bergson actually meant by ‘duration’, and/or “persistence of self identity through time”, it is important to note that we each have a unique perspective of being outside of time. In fact we each seemingly watch from some mysterious 'outside of time' perspective as time seemingly passes us by. Simply put, we very much seem to be standing on a ‘tiny’ island of ‘now’ as the river of time continually flows past us. In the following video, Dr. Suarez states that the irresolvable dilemma for reductive materialists as such, “it is impossible for us to be ‘persons’ experiencing ‘now’ if we are nothing but particles flowing in space time. Moreover, for us to refer to ourselves as ‘persons’ (experiencing now), we cannot refer to space-time as the ultimate substratum upon which everything exists, but must refer to a "Person" who is not bound by space time. (In other words) We must refer to God!”

Nothing: God’s new Name – Antoine Suarez – video Paraphrased quote: (“it is impossible for us to be ‘persons’ experiencing ‘now’ if we are nothing but particles flowing in space time. Moreover, for us to refer to ourselves as ‘persons’, we cannot refer to space-time as the ultimate substratum upon which everything exists, but must refer to a Person who is not bound by space time. i.e. We must refer to God!”) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOr9QqyaLlA

In further defining the immaterial mind’s attribute of ‘the experience of the now’, in the following article Stanley Jaki states that “There can be no active mind without its sensing its existence in the moment called now.,,, ,,,There is no physical parallel to the mind’s ability to extend from its position in the momentary present to its past moments, or in its ability to imagine its future. The mind remains identical with itself while it lives through its momentary nows.”

The Mind and Its Now – Stanley L. Jaki, May 2008 Excerpts: There can be no active mind without its sensing its existence in the moment called now.,,, Three quarters of a century ago Charles Sherrington, the greatest modern student of the brain, spoke memorably on the mind’s baffling independence of the brain. The mind lives in a self-continued now or rather in the now continued in the self. This life involves the entire brain, some parts of which overlap, others do not. ,,,There is no physical parallel to the mind’s ability to extend from its position in the momentary present to its past moments, or in its ability to imagine its future. The mind remains identical with itself while it lives through its momentary nows. ,,, the now is immensely richer an experience than any marvelous set of numbers, even if science could give an account of the set of numbers, in terms of energy levels. The now is not a number. It is rather a word, the most decisive of all words. It is through experiencing that word that the mind comes alive and registers all existence around and well beyond. ,,, All our moments, all our nows, flow into a personal continuum, of which the supreme form is the NOW which is uncreated, because it simply IS. http://metanexus.net/essay/mind-and-its-now

bornagain77

November 11, 2022

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In one of Fred Hoyle's SF novels - I think it's October The First Is Too Late - he uses the analogy of a piece of music like a Beethoven symphony. If you played all the notes in the composition at once, all you'd get a a massive jarring chord. If you play them in the right order, you get a beautiful piece of music. In other words, time is an essential part of making sense of this Universe, at least for life-forms such as us.Seversky

November 11, 2022

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