Did Einstein Secretly Believe The Universe Thinks? (part 2 of 3)
Some Physicists Today Seem To Think So
A main reason the apparently imaginary physical time is different from human time is that no one has ever suggested an origin for physical time, that I ever heard about. In dramatic contrast, the origin of human time is fully known and totally clear.
Also, whereas the apparently imaginary physical time is cloaked in mystery and nothing is known about its characteristics, attributes, or operation, all of this is totally different than is the case with human time.
With human time, everything is known about its origin, its characteristics, its operation, and so on.
Then here it gets even more weird. In spite of the major differences in these 2 types of time, it seems that physics has sometimes believed these 2 types of “time” are identical, but sometimes not.
How could that be possible when Einstein declared unequivocally, in his equations, that physical time is an intrinsic part of the universe, while clearly human time exists only in thinking.
All this just makes no sense.
To wit, Einstein’s concept of “spacetime” assumes there is a physical time that is distinct from human time.
Space is a part of the physicality (as space of course is not empty) so Einstein (Minkowski maybe) would not have imagined to conjoin space and time into a concept if he had realized that time exists only in thinking.
So spacetime is a flawed concept because it combines time from thinking, which has no counterpart in physicality, with space, which is a concept in thinking that does have a counterpart in physicality.
Further, Einstein’s relativity theory talks about dilation of physical time, distinct from human time. If, instead, he would have been suggesting that human time could be dilated, rather than physical time, then he would have known that that made no sense and would be useless.
In physics, unless thoughts have a counterpart in physicality then they may be only imaginary, empty, or even useless. So time dilation that would occur only in thinking would mean nothing.
Clearly Einstein was suggesting that physical time could be dilated, even as he offered no evidence that physical time could even exist.
So here is where the question could arise as to whether the universe could think. I have not heard of any report that Einstein believed that the universe thinks. The same can be said for physicists of today, some of whom do believe in physical time.
But if Einstein might have secretly believed that the universe thinks, then this is one way there might actually could have been a physical time, in existence, that itself might have been much like human time.
That is, if a thinking universe originated the concept of time and then implemented that into the physicality, we could understand where that time came from and how it operated.
But of course the universe does not think, in my opinion, at least not in any manner that we credibly can recognize.
When physics sometimes seems to say that physical time is like human time, and they might even say that these 2 things are one and the same, they don’t explain how time could be part of physicality in any scenario.
And it is totally clear that Einstein, and many physicists today, argue that time is physical in spacetime, in relativistic dilation of time, in GPS, in muon motion, and many more cases as mentioned further below.
When they predict that a human twin zipping around the universe would age more slowly than the other twin who stayed on earth, they actually are talking about a physical effect of ultra high speed and the “time” they speak about in this thought experiment is physical time.
Here, they are predicting that the aging processes of the high flying twin would be slowed by ultra high speed. This is physical.
And when they assert that clocks moving at ultra high speed will tick slower than clocks left behind, this too is about physicality. This would be some alleged mysterious change in a clock’s physicality resulting from ultra high speed. What this physical change could be is never speculated, that I’ve seen.
And about the poor old muons, subatomic particles that are almost nothing, … there cannot be any slowing of aging in a subatomic particle that is not even alive and it is difficult to imagine what other physical effect would accrue to a measely muon from traveling at a speed close to the speed of light.
That’s the common speed of EM particles in general, to move that fast, and they know nothing of the manipulations of time in human thinking. And then their masses, for those that have mass, apparently don’t balloon up with high speed from GR effects. And then, could their path-aligned physical dimension actually be shortened asymptotically, close to zero, making them amazingly flat?
Or, maybe these little bugers are so close to the quantum reality of energy, plasma, and spookiness, in their physical nature, that general relativity doesn’t mess with them so much?
So what actually could physical time be? What could be its attributes? How could the human concept of “rate of flow” possibly be intrinsic in physicality?
(This ends part 2, which provided some details about how some physicists think of physical time, how a thinking universe might have made physical time but didn’t, and more.)
Then part 3 will ask whether Einstein may have boxed himself into a corner about “time”, and it talks about the big consequences of the non-existence of time, and it ends by trying to acknowledge some views that might be opposed to my own, and more.) https://medium.com/@thenking/did-einstein-secretly-believe-the-universe-thinks-part-3-of-3-62d874fc7009
(This article was originally published on Medium.com January 29, 2023)