Did Einstein Secretly Believe The Universe Thinks? (part 3 of 3)

Some Physicists Today Seem To Think So

Physicists do offer various arguments for why they believe in physical time. They often start by declaring that if Einstein’s general relativity works then physical time must exist because it is a critical part of general relativity.

But of course this is circular reasoning.

It appears that Einstein boxed himself into a corner on this. In order to announce to the world back in the early 1900s his groundbreaking and sometimes very wild and non-intuitive work in special and general relativity, he just had to declare that time was physical.

So in his equations he included time as a physical reality. He even declared that his equations were non-severable, to be taken “all or none”, and doing that further reduced the odds of curious minds asking, “hey brother Albert, why aren’t you even bothering to justify your assertion that time exists?”

The laws of physics and chemistry (PhyChem) made all of the physical universe, as far as humanity has learned, and it made all the flow and motion in the physical universe, but then PhyChem did not need to include “rate of flow” for the universe to work. PhyChem did not make physical time. It does not exist.

Physical motion is not the same as “rate of motion”, which itself is what human time is, a concept.

So now “we the people” could brattily say to our friends “ya know, guys, time does not exist” and we could watch the thinking on their faces as they first are puzzled as to why we would say something so stupid.

Then we could watch them decide whether to even respond to our assertion. Then we could see that they are wondering what sort of mind-altering substance we had ingested.

But be prepared for the likelihood that they don’t actually want to know about this, so we likely wouldn’t even have a chance to explain to them what we meant.

“Boring”, is what they are thinking at this point. Yep, for a variety of reasons people don’t want to hear about reality. What! Sad but true.

So we might just have to walk away thinking that, aha, we do know something that Einstein apparently did not know, and further, what we know about non-time is so powerful that our friends just couldn’t handle it anyway. It is too rich for them, so they just pivot away and call it boring.

Now there are several big consequences of the non-existence of time, and btw, our friends don’t want to know about this either. It makes us wonder, though, if we might want to trade in our friends for some smarter ones.

1 … Einstein’s spacetime cannot be an explanation of gravity because physical time does not exist. And if spacetime itself is only a concept in thinking, with no counterpart existing in physicality for its “human time” component of spacetime, then this conjoined spacetime concept would be inane and useless.

2 … Time travel is not possible because there is no “time container” in which anything could move backward or forward. But do you think this will stop the science fiction books and movies from telling you how much they know about time travel? Don’t answer.

Well, truth is, most likely there weren’t a lot of people in line to do some time traveling anyway.

3 … There is no fourth physical dimension, called time, to be added to the first three physical dimensions of length, width, and height.

But here, people can continue doing what they always had done with so-called “four dimensions”. They most likely didn’t know it, so no need to tell them I suppose, but they were conflating human time with three dimensions of physicality. Most likely they don’t even want to know.

4 … Then for physicists, spacetime is not an explanation of gravity, there is no time dilation in physicality, apparently length shortening at ultra high speed is not a physical effect, muons don’t experience time, GPS is kluged in various ways to make it work, and so on.

5 … And physicists do sometimes pose other arguments for physical time to include radiometric dating, quantum time dilation, redshifting of radiation due to expansion in the universe, bending of light due to foreground masses, frame dragging on a rotating body, precession of orbits, light losing energy as it falls into a gravitational field and gaining energy as it climbs out, overall effects of strong gravity versus weak, and more.

But … it is difficult to understand how any of these listed arguments actually point toward physical time, but instead they all apparently are about aspects of physicality like flow, motion, and movement.

6 … Then sometimes we hear that the “arrow of time” is an argument for the existence of physical time. But what this arrow actually is about is the emergence of the physicality as driven by the laws of physics and chemistry. This arrow is about the flow of physicality itself and does not indicate existential physical time.

Now then, if we wanna find some smarter friends I just don’t know where we could find them. I’ve already checked on Ebay and there aren’t any used friends listed there.

But, maybe we all could find some new friends from among the many physicists who do confidently declare that physical time does not exist.

Now then, we wanna be fair to people who have opposing views to anything in this article.

Here I must admit that sometimes I do get a sinking feeling when I’m poking at physicists, like herein asking them for explanations to the puzzles in this article, in that I’ve wondered if there could be some explanation that I’ve overlooked.

For example, could it be possible that for 100 years since Einstein’s early work on relativity, the physicists do know that physical time does not exist but somehow they don’t explain that adequately well?

And might they now say that I’ve misunderstood their positions on physical time, spacetime, dilation of time, and much more?

And I’ve wondered about those stars that are ripping around close to SgrA, the Milky Way’s supermasssive black hole, and would those stars be going fast enough to have their “time dilated”, according to some physicists, and their mass dramatically increased, and their one dimension shortened, so now would some physicists, say, no, those stars aren’t yet going fast enough to clearly demonstrate such effects of general relativity (GR)?

And those stars, and planets also most likely, that have been flung out of our galaxy at amazingly high speeds, would some physicists say that these objects also are not going fast enough to clearly demonstrate GR?

And I’ve wondered if some physicists might now say, “oh, about that twins thought experiment, we don’t know what the mechanics might be in the biology of the ultra fast-moving twin who has his aging slowed, but we trust Einstein and general relativity?

And might they say that they don’t feel any need to explain how physical time originated and how it could be intrinsic in physicality, and that all they need to do is demonstrate that it exists?

And might they declare that the sum of their various arguments for the existence of physical time is a substantial body of logic that everyone should accept as “proof” that physical time exists?

Perhaps some could say that people like me just need to get our PhD’s in physics and then we’d understand what Einstein declared about time.

Sorry, I feel that I’m not doing justice above for “opposing views” so maybe some physicists will hear about this article and weigh in, which hope is one of the reasons this article is published.

As you may well have recognized, in this article I was picking on physicists as a new attempt to get them to address the types of citizen questions and puzzles that are included in this article. The public deserves to know such things.

So here’s the dilemma for physics, as I understand it. If they now take a stand that time is physical, there are serious problems in trying to justify this stand. But if they now say that time is not physical, then apparently much of physics has to be re-worked.

(End of part 3 of 3)

(This article was originally published on Medium.com January 29, 2023)