Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows
equably without relation to anything external. Newton
Is then time the fourth dimension? Not necessarily, you could still
four dimensions say three to live in and one to curve space in the direction
of and then through the time as the fifth dimension It is possible and useful
2
to view time as a higher dimension, but we should not to the conclusion that
whatever we talk about a higher dimension we are referring to time.
What causes the sense of the passage of the time? Is this an illusion?
Various people have attacked the question. One of the best attempts is David
Parks article the myth of Passage the time(Springer Link)
I maintain that the latter is the case. I have called the passage of
time a myth rather than an illusion, say, because it involves no deception of
the senses - we shall see that one cannot perform any experiment to tell
unambiguously whether time passes or not. There are no sensory data in the
ordinary meaning of the term. I use the word myth because this picture of a
3
time that passes us, or through which we pass, is the dominating source of
the private as well as the literary language through which we seek to
express our experience of time.
Parks idea is that we are in fact at each instant of our lives. Every
moment of past and future history exists permanently in the frame work of
4-D space time. The illusion of the passage of time is a consequence of the
structure of the universe (R. Rucker). In particular, it is a consequence of the
fact that the memory traces of an event are always located in space-time
points whose time coordinates have greater values the time coordinats of
the event . This fact cannot be explained; it is simply an observable property
of the universe. That is, you are going to have memories of thoughts or
events only at times later than the times at which these thoughts or
events occur. There is not paradox in the claim that my earlier self who
wrote the previous sentence still exists. I will always be drawing that
picture, typing this sentence, drawing this picture and meeting my death.
Every instance of your life exist always.Rucker pag.60)
Time does not pass. if we entered back into our body and mind of
five minutes ago, we would have no memory of having been in the future.
The consciousness of five minutes ago is unalterable.
The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my
consciousness, crawling upward along the life-line of my body, does a
section of the world come to life as a fleeting image in space which
continually changes in time. Weyl
It is not the time that flows independently and outside of us, but our
consciousness that penetrates and crosses it just as our body crosses a
spatial distance.
We finally hold that as we are moving through the space with our
footsteps, we are going through time with our consciousness, we do feel that
time is passing.
Any line which joins different events associated with a given object
will be called a world-line.The moving particle of the three-dimensional
space is transformed into a trajectory for the four-dimensional space-time,
motion becomes a line.
Developing this transformation
we have that the old points of
space become events in space-
5
time - 4 dimensions- the material bodies become lines, the world lines,
tracing the history of its location in space at each instant in time, straight
lines for the smooth movement, and curves for the changing, and eventually
the three-dimensional animated evolution becomes a four immobile petrified
image. (in the figures we use only one spatial dimension that represents
space and responds to our intuition.) The physical space of our experience is
a three-dimensional section of space-time that we imagine to move in the
direction of the 4th dimension, that is, time. The 3-D world we live in at any
moment, is but a cross section of 4-D space time. In 1908 H. Minkowski, a
young Russian mathematician presented a paper in which he interpreted
Special Relativity as a theory about the geometry of space-time, where he
introduces a type of picture called a Minkowskis diagram that is based in
the premises of the above space time diagram.
Given the way that things are in our world, what can we infer about
the structure of space time? What is the geometry of space time? What type
of metric does it have? In Euclidean 3-D space we have the Euclidean
geometry and the Pythagorean theorem respectively. These two cornerstones
of physical space (that is only one) were based on physical measurements
with rigid bodies, here in new space-time we will find new experiences to
install the corresponding entities: this is the world of the relativity theory.
But we cannot take a feed from the stomach of a man with a single time
backwards, without disturbing him!
Time keeps its identity, but we must emphasize once again that the
use of space-time diagram and later the geometry of space-time means one
thing: static perception of time. Is there any other type of consciousness
available to us than the various points along our life-worm? Is there any way
to be conscious in static space-time instead of moving space? Such
conscious is the goal of the mystics quest. Practitioners of Yoga speak of
immortality and freedom, consciousness of the Eternal Now, and the
transcendence of time. R. Rucker. With their deep meditation intervene
into consciousness and it seems to be in fact possible to escape the feeling of
time passing, a timeless feeling.
But the question remains: why all this? why this reference to the four-
dimensional state, space-time, static time? The spatio-temporal diagrams
have been known since ancient times, why now we insist on the geometric
description of motion by removing our own intuition?
George Mpantes
Serres 18/9/2017
Sources