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Technologist
PDF: Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity

QUOTE
Peter Lynds, a 27 year old broadcasting school tutor from Wellington, New Zealand, establishes that there is a necessary trade off of all precisely determined physical values at a time, for their continuity through time, and in doing so, appears to throw age old assumptions about determined instantaneous physical magnitude and time on their heads. A number of other outstanding issues to do with time in physics are also addressed, including cosmology and an argument against the theory of Imaginary time by British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

A bold paper which has highly impressed some of the world's top physicists and been published in the August issue of Foundations of Physics Letters, seems set to change the way we think about the nature of time and its relationship to motion and classical and quantum mechanics. Much to the science world's astonishment, the work also appears to provide solutions to Zeno of Elea's famous motion paradoxes, almost 2500 years after they were originally conceived by the ancient Greek philosopher. In doing so, its unlikely author, who originally attended university for just 6 months, is drawing comparisons to Albert Einstein and beginning to field enquiries from some of the world's leading science media ...


Link: Wiki - Peter_Lynds

QUOTE
Lynds' work involves the subject of time. The main conclusion of his paper is that there is a necessary trade off of all precise physical magnitudes at a time, for their continuity over time. More specifically, that there is not an instant in time underlying an object's motion, and as its position is constantly changing over time, and as such, never determined, it also does not have a determined relative position. Lynds posits that this is also the correct resolution of Zeno's paradoxes, with the paradoxes arising because people have wrongly assumed that an object in motion has a determined relative position at any given instant in time, thus rendering the body's motion static and frozen at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived. A further implication of this conclusion is that if there is no such thing as determined relative position, velocity, acceleration, momentum, mass, energy and all other physical magnitudes, cannot be precisely determined at any time either. Other implications of Lynds' work are that time does not flow, that in relation to indeterminacy in precise physical magnitude, the micro and macroscopic are inextricably linked and both a part of the same parcel, rather than just a case of the former underlying and contributing to the latter, that Chronons, proposed atoms of time, cannot exist, that it does not appear necessary for time to emerge or congeal from the big bang, and that Stephen Hawking's theory of Imaginary time would appear to be meaningless, as it is the relative order of events that is relevant, not the direction of time itself, because time does not go in any direction. Consequently, it is meaningless for the order of a sequence of events to be imaginary, or at right angles, relative to another order of events.
Technologist
Wow, that's very interesting kort. Thanks for the info.

As the articles makes clear in its conclusion:

QUOTE
Summary? I think he's a very bright 17 yr old radio student, who's written some genuine philosophical speculations on time, then fancies having a go at spreading it around, the response being more than he could have imagined. He is also Brooke Jones. To pad out his story, he's using another 'Peter Lynds' from Wellington, the insurance broker, as a cover.
It's a kind of a hoax, but that doesn't mean he's wrong about time...


I'm confident that the published materials have legitimate ideas, some of which I have thought about on my own in the past, but if does turn out that this individual is a 17 year old then I am even more impressed and intrigued than I was before. smile.gif
Rick
Time is a mental construction. See "A World Without Time" by Yourgrau:

http://www.amazon.com/World-Without-Time-F...n/dp/0465092934

Apparently, Kurt Godel agrees with me (but he thought of it first). If you replace the "t" in physical equations with an equivalent energy term, time disappears! For example, kinetic energy equals mass times half of velocity squared. Solve velocity for time (t) and substitute in the energy equation. It's cumbersome to do physics that way, hence, our conceptualization of time is a computational convenience.
Hey Hey
QUOTE(Rick @ May 17, 2007, 07:48 PM) *
Apparently, Kurt Godel agrees with me (but he thought of it first). If you replace the "t" in physical equations with an equivalent energy term, time disappears! For example, kinetic energy equals mass times half of velocity squared. Solve velocity for time (t) and substitute in the energy equation. It's cumbersome to do physics that way, hence, our conceptualization of time is a computational convenience.
I'm not necessarily critizing what you said, but here's a statement to consider:

Reinaldo Baretty Machin "Goodel gave too much importance to his solution. After all any equation can allow many mathematical solutions which bear no relation to physical reality or fact."
lucid_dream
this Peter Lynds fellow is just parroting some of Einstein's informal/philosophical ideas over the nature of time that he communicated in his letters. If you read about Peter Lynd's background, he admits he was obsessed with Einstein's biography and thus either intentionally or unintentionally is trying to take credit for ideas about time that are not due to him. I'm surprised other people have not already picked up on Peter's "borrowing" of Einstein's philosophical ideas over time since, as Technologist noted, this story is already a few years old.
Rick
QUOTE(Hey Hey @ May 17, 2007, 02:09 PM) *
...here's a statement to consider:

Reinaldo Baretty Machin "Goodel gave too much importance to his solution. After all any equation can allow many mathematical solutions which bear no relation to physical reality or fact."

That's true of many theories, Special Relativity included. The mathematics allows treating time as a full fledged dimension equivalent to length, width, and depth (x, y, and z). That doesn't mean it's valid to consider time is something real as is a spatial dimension.

Some philosophers go so far as to say that space isn't real either, but I'm not yet prepared to go that far. But I am convinced (for now) that time is not something that has the property of existence. It's more of a computational thing like pure number or geometry (that is, it's merely an idea, not a thing in any ontological sense).
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