A thought-experiment about matter, space, and time.

A thought-experiment about matter, space, and time.(hubski.com)

25 points by pacohn 15 years ago | 10 comments

IsaacL 15 years ago |

My first thought is "OK, now put down the bong".

More constructively, while I too enjoy amateur philosophy, I think the further you stray into actual physics the greater your chances of saying something provably nonsensical.

pacohn 15 years ago | |

I don't think the second part of your comment was any more constructive. Even if you don't agree with the basis or the the conclusions, there is value in these kinds of exercises. At the very least, it might give someone new perspective on their own ideas. Someone might stumble upon something useful.

IMO as long as we can't explain one of the most important forces that we experience, I don't think we should so casually dismiss these kinds of pursuits.

JoeAltmaier 15 years ago | |

Seems like nonsense - always does when you resort to first principles.

I like to wonder, how do we know space is expanding? When particles get further apart, do they also grow in size? Then how would we know they are further apart? The entire system got bigger, including the ruler.

I know, we measure light and that's the ruler. So light doesn't expand too?

pacohn 15 years ago | | |

As far as I know, the evidence of expansion has everything to do with light. It's the Doppler effect. There is an apparent red shift (expansion of wavelengths) if you are moving away from the source, and a blue shift (compression of wavelengths) if you are moving towards the source. We see everything around us as red shifted, so it looks like we are raisins in a loaf of expanding bread. All raisins are moving away from each other, or the space in between raisins is expanding.

varjag 15 years ago | |

Was my exact sentiment too. I want the two minutes of my life back.

VaedaStrike 15 years ago |

I wish I had more time to look at this right now. This is so very much in sync with so many of my sleepless nights thinking oh so very too much about relational database design theory and how it relates to the whole of existence.

Even though I've not done more than to read a couple of paragraphs it's a veeeeery cool post! very cool post indeed!

arethuza 15 years ago |

This reminds me of Mach's Principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle

mikhailfranco 15 years ago | |

Yes, that is where it all started, but there is ongoing development of the relational view. For example, in this essay Julian Barbour derives an expression for time in terms of positions:

http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Barbour_The_Nature_...

And here is David Mermin's "Ithaca Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", otherwise known as the "Zero Worlds" hypothesis (to contrast to the more famous "Many Worlds"), because it is entirely relational:

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801057

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9609013

Mik

markkat 15 years ago | | |

Thanks for pointing these out mikhailfranco and arethuza. I'm the author of the linked post. I'll be giving them a read.

Just scanning them now, I think they will be very helpful.

miniatureape 15 years ago |

Given what definition of space? Newton, for one, would not agree with many of your premises, such as the fact that distance is a matter only of relations. And he may have been proven "wrong," but there was a significant amount of theory between Plato and now that you might not want to shuffle under the carpet.

But I should add that I'm no expert myself.