h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If inertia is there to resist the pull of time, why is is time pulling in the first place? What happens if there is no inertia? What is the effect of the pull of time?

You also said the pull of time is the pull of other particles. The pull of other particles has traditionally been by gravity, EM, strong, weak, etc...it is well known how inertia interacts with these forces, but how do you equate these forces with the pull of time?

forget what i said about inertia
just know that those forces exist in 4-d (3 + time), not the regular 3 as we previously assumed
that is, each particle is pulled towards or away from all past and future instances of each other particle in the same way that they r traditionally thought of as pulling or pushing in 3d
>8^B

this can also explain electron tunneling
most objects move too slow for the effect of 4-d vectors to b evident, because (in my opinion) the speed of light is one, so there are 3e+8 m in a second
that means that only something moving near lightspeed can b visibly affected by the past and future of the other particles which also have to b moving near lightspeed
that is, if u have an electron moving toward another one, and the other one is moving away, if it happens fast enough, the first electron can jump to the other side of the second one due to the past of the second one pushing it towards where the second one's present is
it is hard to explain but i have a good idea in my head
>8^B

That's a very interesting explanation of tunneling that I've never heard before. That also implies that tunneling is an event which definitely does or does not occur. My understanding has always been that there are probabilities of tunneling occuring, not hard and fast cases of whether or does or does not.

How can future and past particles affect the current particle? How would you actually calculate the force of past and future particles on the present?

just a 4-d vector
under the (unproven) assumption that the speed of light is equal to one, there are 3e+8 meters in a second
i do not believe in all of that probability nonsense
it is not that it "may or may not" b in a location, it is that we cannot tell because it moves so fast
>8^B

Uhmm, I don't understand how your reply
"just a 4-d vector
under the (unproven) assumption that the speed of light is equal to one, there are 3e+8 meters in a second"

answer either of my questions. What are you trying to say here?

Why don't you believe in that probability nonsense?

to the first question, i already forgot
and to the second, i think that the scientists jumped to that conclusion without any sort of proof, they just sort of decided that because we can't know everything (position and velocity) about an electron, that it has no exact location
>8^B

no, that's not true. You can know the position of an electron exactly, it's wrong to say that you can't. It's jus that if you do, you have no knowledge of the velocity.

ok how's this: you can't know where it will be in one nanosecond
>8^B

Do you mean you can't predict where it will be in 1 nanosecond, or you can't know where it is to within 1 nanosecond? The first can be true, the second is not.

dave

i meant the former
how would u know location to one nanosecond?
i thought we were keeping space and time seperate
of course, i suppose we could refer to time as location
but that makes things confusing because then u have "at what time is it at this time?" which makes no sense, even tho it transl8s to "when is it here?"
>8^B

OKay, former. hmmm. Yes, you can know roughly where the electron will be in 1 nanosecond. But the accuracy decreases as a function of time. So in 2 nanoseconds it'll be less acurate.

hmm, i'm in disagreement with this notion that the universe moving up is what causes those "stretchy grids". These "stretchy girds", actually called embedding diagrams, are the result of matter's influence on space.

Matter curves the manifold that it resides in. In all actuality, embedding diagrams are a map of the 3-D deformation caused by the presence of matter in space, however, they're always drawn as just one slice, a "stretchy grid", since displaying a fully 3-D deformation can be a little tricky. This effective curvature of spacetime is what "gravity" really is. As the object that deforms spacetime perturbs its surroundings it produces gravitational waves that propagate out through the manifold, much like a drop of milk falling into a saucer. It's not that time is driving forward resulting in space being pulled past matter.

just to be more clear:

the curvature in embedding diagrams is NOT in the third cartesian coordinate. embedding diagrams are a map of the effects of curved spacetime and are merely a "trick" used to describe visually the effects of curved spacetime. it doesn't matter the orientation of the curvature in the diagrams (up or down) so long as you don't have both bumps (up) AND dents (down) in the same embedding diagram.

Thanks Albarn

That was basically what my understanding was, but I wasn't sure if my understand was correct or not. Our other friend in this discussion had another view, that I was trying to elucidate and understand more clearly, hoping for a new perspective on the problem. Good explanations.

dave

well put
but i think that 4d distortion is there because space is moving up in the time direction (shown on the vertical axis) and it doesn't want to
now that i think about it, i do think it is an odd coincidence that our attempt to represent this four-dimensional concept in 3d just so happens to lead one person (probably more, since i have never actually had an original thought even if i have come up with pre-established concepts independantly) to discover that mass is based on inertia, all because of an arbitrary convention based on our inability to perceive more than 3 dimensions
although i guess it's not that strange, since my realization came from an understanding of the projection convention, rather than a misunderstanding
still, it would be much more interesting if i had come to my conclusion from a misunderstanding of the convention and its meaning
>8^B

about bumps and dents
that would signify exotic matter
>8^B

but am i the only one who finds it odd that the same effect could be achieved if our model were to attempt to explain objects with 4d inertia rather than just 3d, and that really all the vectors we use could be given a time direction and still make sense, and that perhaps _all_ matter is merely the 4d slope of spacetime at any give point in spacetime, like one of those 2d slopefields, but in 4d?
>8^B

Hmm, now we're asking which came first, the chicken or the egg? Does mass cause spacetime to slope, or is mass defined as the slope of spacetime? I always thought that the traditional answer was that mass caused the slope, but I don't have any proof or knowledge of proof of that

It's a good question, which leads to some other good ideas...Do other forces exist b/c of particles, or are the particles manifestations of the forces? (eg. electrons, coulomb interaction)

dave

woah
that last sentence made me think
at the beginning of it, i thought u were talking about force particles, but u actually meant...

actually, i do like the idea of trying to look at it backwards to see what we can discover
it seems we learn more from semantics and communications breakdowns than from the evidence itself
bravo, us!
>8^B