Scott,
Thanks for the feedback. I like to make clear that I shouldn’t be in this conversation, as I’m entirely self taught and physics theory is the pinnacle of organized logic.
Which goes to why I might be in an outsiders position to offer possible insights.
You cover a broad range of issues and I’ll try to organize a semi-coherent response;
For one thing, while math is an incredibly valuable tool, the natural human tendency seems to treat such tools as gods, as succeeding generations find themselves in frameworks of thought and logic that they must first become conversant in, but also indoctrinated by. Like any language, or cultural construct, where it becomes foundational to our thought process.
As I like to point out, epicycles were brilliant math and contributed much to the evolution of geometry, yet the crystalline spheres proposed as material explanation were lousy physics.
Similarly I would argue that General Relativity is brilliant math, but spacetime, as its material basis, is lousy physics.
The math is map, not territory. As such, descriptive, not explanatory.
Which goes not only to the issue of time, but the dimensionality of space, as well. Basically three dimensions are the xyz coordinate system and a mapping device. So this description is no more fundamentally causal of space, than longitude, latitude and altitude are causal, rather than simply descriptive of the biosphere of this planet.
While I argue in this essay that it might be more effective to think of space as the absolute/equilibrium and the infinite, with energy and the forms expressed cycling between expanding to infinity and coalescing to equilibrium, I also think the effort to fully quantify time and the narrative course of events, should be viewed with caution. That we simply cannot fully know the past, in fact barely know it much more than we can guess at the future. Just for a moment, consider all that occurs to you and around you at any given moment, not to mention, say ten days ago. Then compound that by effectively infinity.
So what if we can only live in the present? Is that a state of ignorance, or would we better understand those thermodynamic processes driving and formulating the world in which we function? To which the details are little more than leaves and litter blowing around in the wind. For one thing it might create a social and cultural context and environment in which all the little fictions we populate our life with are little more than fertilizer of the imagination. Such piles of nonsense as the current political civil war might not be able to be constructed from everyone’s collective illusions and delusions, before being knocked down by those winds. Which does happen eventually, but much more destructively to society and the environment.
I could try to go on with this, but I’m just trying to formulate an alternative vision of reality and have had very little luck in getting anyone willing to even take the first step.
Just try explaining to someone with a physics background the logical consequences of,”Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns,” if you want to be banned from any further conversation. Apparently multiverses are much more logically acceptable.
So I spend my life living my life and wondering if sometime in the future, people will break out of this current shell and whether grow further, or rush off to find another.
PS, Certainly entangled systems share the same time, as they are harmonized. Here is an interesting interview, from a couple decades ago;
Regards,
John
