ghosts vs extra dimensions


jts

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Look up at a corner of your ceiling. What do you see? You see 3 lines, each perpendicular to the other 2 lines.

Now try to imagine a 4th line perpendicular to all of the 3 lines. If you can imagine that, that is some very good imagining.

Physicists take seriously a theory that there are 10 (or 11 or whatever) dimensions of space and 1 of time. I doubt anybody ever saw any dimensions of space beyond 3. I doubt they can imagine these extra dimensions of space (beyond 3). I guess they have some kind of mathematical or theoretical evidence of these extra dimensions or think they have, but dimensions of space beyond 3 don't make any physical sense to me. No doubt that is because I am uneducated.

Ghosts are a different matter (punny?). Probably no scientist worth his salt as a scientist believes in ghosts. Ghosts are for the uneducated, the superstitious, the Dark Ages. But some people claim to have seen ghosts, which I suspect is more than what can be said about the extra dimensions of space. And even if you never saw a ghost, you can at least imagine ghosts, which is better than what you can do with the extra dimensions of space.

I'm not saying we have evidence of existence of ghosts, only that it seems to me ghosts are easier to believe in than the extra dimensions of space.

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Ghosts are a different matter (punny?). Probably no scientist worth his salt as a scientist believes in ghosts. Ghosts are for the uneducated, the superstitious, the Dark Ages. But some people claim to have seen ghosts, which I suspect is more than what can be said about the extra dimensions of space. And even if you never saw a ghost, you can at least imagine ghosts, which is better than what you can do with the extra dimensions of space.

I'm not saying we have evidence of existence of ghosts, only that it seems to me ghosts are easier to believe in than the extra dimensions of space.

Our ordinary sense organs cannot detect outside the three spatial dimensions. We have a "sense" of time. We can compare oscillations (in a certain range) with our heartbeat. Anything else requires instruments. Normal folks cannot "see" ghosts.

And those who claim to see ghosts will have to produce instrument based events so the rest of us can corroborate the claim.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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There was a decent scifi book, by I think Ben Bova, (or Greg Bear?) about those extra dimensions. I remember the protagonist was able to glimpse them and noticed plants growing in them invisible to a normal persons eyes. Some of these plants, fed off people in some manner. People at a picnic for instance, left the grassy field feeling nauseous, thinking it was the food, but it was actually the mult-dimensional plants that caused the harm.

So could creatures inhabit these extra dimensions, cross over to ours, or just exist in more places at once? Perhaps dark matter is stuff which is a crossover material.

All the reality ghost shows I have seen are scams.

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There was a decent scifi book, by I think Ben Bova, (or Greg Bear?) about those extra dimensions. I remember the protagonist was able to glimpse them and noticed plants growing in them invisible to a normal persons eyes. Some of these plants, fed off people in some manner. People at a picnic for instance, left the grassy field feeling nauseous, thinking it was the food, but it was actually the mult-dimensional plants that caused the harm.

So could creatures inhabit these extra dimensions, cross over to ours, or just exist in more places at once? Perhaps dark matter is stuff which is a crossover material.

All the reality ghost shows I have seen are scams.

They would have to be damned small. The extra dimensions are very restricted in size. If they exist at all.

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  • 2 months later...

Even if we cannot perceive all of the existing dimensions I imagine experiments and mechanical devices devised by humans will observe these extra dimensions. Someday. Humans cannot perceive more than three dimensions and we perceive the action of causality as *time.*

Einstein said, physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one. I cant verify when or where Albert said that so I will print the whole quote below.

Personally, I think each of our perceived seconds of time is different and past, present, and future are connected and sequential. Therefore time travel is like the ghost concept and not valid. Peter

Is it time to rewrite the laws of physics? By Tom Chivers Science Last updated: August 26th, 2013

'Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so, said Ford Prefect in Douglas Adamss The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. For the past century, mainstream physics has agreed with him. To most of us, it seems obvious that the world is moving steadily forward through time, from a known past, through an active present, into a mysterious future. But, as Einstein said, physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.

Mainstream physics basically eliminates time as a fundamental aspect of nature, explains Prof Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Ontario, Canada. It does that in various ways, but the most common is the so-called 'block universe picture, which is derived from general relativity.

Under this system, what is actually real is not our passage through time, but the whole of reality at once. Imagine taking a movie of your life, says Prof Smolin, and laying out the frames on a table, and saying: that is your life. There is no now, there is no change.

He thinks that it is high time so to speak this view was overturned. In his new book Time Reborn, he makes the case that time is a fundamental reality of the universe, and that without it, too many of the big questions of physics are left unanswerable.

The question of what time is, and whether it is real or illusory, is an ancient one. Even before Plato, Greek philosophers were debating whether, as Heraclitus said, you cannot step in the same river twice, that all is flux and change, or whether Parmenides was right and that change is an illusion, that the universe simply exists as an unchanging lump.

The first person to address the issue in depth, according to Dr Julian Barbour, author of The End of Time, was St Augustine. He was baffled by it, and said as much. What then is time? Augustine wrote. If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. Still, he did make an attempt to explain it, coming to the surprisingly modern conclusion that there could not have been time before the world, because there would have been no change, and without change, time is meaningless.

Sir Isaac Newton, a thousand years later, disagreed. He held the common-sense view instinctively shared by the rest of us that time is absolute, marching on regardless of the doings of the stuff of the universe. It was Einstein who showed that it was no such thing.

According to his theories of relativity, time and space are part of an interwoven fabric: the presence of matter changes both, stretching the fabric like a weight on a sheet.

His theories are counterintuitive arguing that someone who is traveling ages slower than someone who is standing still, and that time goes faster the further we get from the surface of the Earth but at least, in his universe, there is such a thing as time.

Einstein, in a way, makes time something real with the idea of space-time, he makes it as real as space, says Dr Barbour. But there is a fundamental difference, which leads us to one of the great problems with our concept of time: We get the impression that we are always moving through time, when we can perfectly happily sit still and have no impression that we are moving through space. Thats a very big mystery, because the laws of physics work exactly the same way whether you run them forwards or backwards.

Clearly, that is not how we perceive the world. We see babies be born, grow old and die; water flowing downhill; and wood burning to ash. If you drop an egg on the floor, it breaks, and there is no way you can put that egg back together again, says Dr Barbour.

This is due to a property called entropy, or disorder. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that the universe will move from ordered, low-entropy states to disordered, high-entropy states: ice will melt and coffee will cool, until everything is the same temperature, and everything is mixed together in an undifferentiated mass. According to the fundamental laws of physics as we know them, it shouldnt make any difference which way you look at them. And yet it is clearly the case that entropy increases, Dr Barbour says.

That leaves an awful lot of questions unanswered which is where Prof Smolins ideas come in. The second law dictates that any system in disequilibrium should come quickly to equilibrium, he points out. But our universe, even though its more than 13 billion years old, is very far from equilibrium.

This is due to particular facts about the laws of physics such as the strength of gravity, or the precise set of particles we observe and the very specific way that the universe began. But Prof Smolin points out that we still do not know why those laws are as they are, or why the universe should have started in its particular way: There seems to be no simple principle that picks out the standard model of particle physics from a vast number of equally likely possibilities. Uncountable billions of other universes could have existed in which there would be no stars, no planets, and no us.

Prof Smolins point is that, for modern physics, in which time is treated as an illusion, this question is unanswerable. The initial conditions and laws, in the block universe model, are just part of the universe. It would be like asking a computer to explain the program its running. But if we treat the laws as things that could have been different had history gone differently, or that can change with time, then time has to exist prior to those laws, and then it has to be real in a way that the block universe doesnt allow.

There is a risk with much of theoretical physics that it strays into a realm of philosophy, away from the science of experiment and reality. Prof Smolin insists that this is not the case: his idea of real time includes hypotheses that make testable predictions. One such experiment might be to use quantum computers, which, in theory, will be able to detect the evolution of physical laws. Dr Barbour (whose book tends to support the time-is-an-illusion school of thought), says that observations of astronomical phenomena called gamma-ray bursts might also show violations of Einsteins laws at the universes smallest scale although so far, he says, they have proved remarkably robust.

If Prof Smolin is right, he believes that it will have implications far beyond academic physics. A lot of our thinking about many things, from the nature of being human to political and environmental problems, are poisoned by the belief that the future is already determined and that we cant find truly novel solutions, he says. For example, in economics, the insistence that the laws are formalized in a timeless mathematical setting, like Newtonian physics, leads to some incorrect ideas, which helped contribute to the economic disaster of 2008. A model of the world in which the future is open, and the universe can discover novel structures, novel ideas, creates a very different idea of our possibilities and could lead to some very different thinking.

Whether hes right or not, only time itself will tell. Certainly, physics has done away with the concept of time for so long that simply saying that it is real feels almost

Comments:

A1234567Z

09/05/2013 08:26 AM

60 seconds, 60 minutes, 60 hours, can be arranged like fence posts, telegraph poles or Electricity pylons one post is one dimensional 6 posts is two dimensional 6 by 4 posts is three dimensional and a box of 6 by 4 by 4 posts is four dimensional, consider a star its life and death, the birth and death of galaxies, and then all the host of generations of the galaxies, and then consider a question that was once asked, teach us to number (count) our days, that we may apply our hearts to

john

08/31/2013 08:37 PM

Time is simply the perception of entropy. For physics time matters naught. For a series of mental snapshots of the universe time is of prime importance. Quantum theory and relativity say nothing about perception. And so where is the issue?

mefatha

08/31/2013 12:10 PM

Time has a natural arrow as there are asymmetric phenomena; the main one has been mentioned which is the continuing increase in entropy in any system over time. The second is in the asymmetrical decay of certain particles. Neither phenomenon is inconsistent with the "block universe" described.

Quantum mechanics provides a more basic problem; the" collapse of the wave function" in quantum systems, where an "observation" results in the fixing of the properties of particles.

"Before observation" we have an entangled wave form -> "after observation" we have individual particles which exist with fixed properties.

This is a very strange world in which we as observing agents apparently produce the arrow of time and events are undecided until observations are made.

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