Time and space
- Thread starter s_lone
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Hi s_lone !
Are time and space two aspects of the same thing?
Yes,they are both product of thought .Let,s talk about the center which is us ,the consciousness. That is, the centre has the borders which it recognises as "the me". As long as there is a centre, it must have a circumference. And it tries to extend the area of the circumference - by drugs, through meditation, through various forms of will, and so o-n. It tries to extend the space it is aware of as consciousness, to make it grow wider But, as long as it is a centre its space must always be limited. So as long as there is a centre, space must always be confined - like a prisoner living in a prison. He has freedom to walk in the yard but he is always a prisoner. He may get a larger yard, he may get a better building, more comfortable rooms, with bathrooms and all the rest of it, but he is still limited. As long as there is a centre, there must be the limitation of space, and therefore the centre can never be free! It is like a prisoner saying "I am free", within the prison walls. He is not free. Many people may realize unconsciously that there is no such thing as freedom within the field of consciousness, with a centre, and therefore they ask whether it is possible to extend consciousness, expand consciousness - by literature, by music, by art, by drugs, by various processes. But as long as there is a centre, the observer, the thinker, the watcher, whatever he does will be within the prison walls. Right ? But there is a distance between the border and the centre,and he wants to go beyond it, transcend it, push it farther away,expand . A rubber band, you can stretch it, but if you stretch it beyond a certain point, it breaks. And when one lives in a small flat in a very crowded street and there is no open country to breathe in and no opportunity to go there, one becomes violent. The animals do this. They have territorial rights because they want space in which to hunt, and they prevent anyone else coming into that area. So, everything demands expansion - trade, insects, animals and human beings, they all must have space. Not only outwardly, but inwardly. The centre, being the prisoner of its own limitation, wants expansion. It seeks expansion through identification - with God, with an idea, with an ideal, with a formula, with a concept. And it thinks it can live differently, at a different level, though it is living in a miserable prison. And the centre being a thought tries to expand by identification with something - with the nation, with the family, with the group, with culture - you know, expand, expand. But it is still living in prison! As long as there is a centre there is no freedom. So what what happens? It invents time as a means of escape. I will gradually escape from this prison. I will practise, I will meditate, I will do this and won't do that. Gradually, tomorrow, next year, the future. It has not only created space which is limited, but also it has created time! And it has become a slave to a space and a time of its own.
Now that brings a question ,can one live without the "center"?
Are time and space two aspects of the same thing?
Yes,they are both product of thought .Let,s talk about the center which is us ,the consciousness. That is, the centre has the borders which it recognises as "the me". As long as there is a centre, it must have a circumference. And it tries to extend the area of the circumference - by drugs, through meditation, through various forms of will, and so o-n. It tries to extend the space it is aware of as consciousness, to make it grow wider But, as long as it is a centre its space must always be limited. So as long as there is a centre, space must always be confined - like a prisoner living in a prison. He has freedom to walk in the yard but he is always a prisoner. He may get a larger yard, he may get a better building, more comfortable rooms, with bathrooms and all the rest of it, but he is still limited. As long as there is a centre, there must be the limitation of space, and therefore the centre can never be free! It is like a prisoner saying "I am free", within the prison walls. He is not free. Many people may realize unconsciously that there is no such thing as freedom within the field of consciousness, with a centre, and therefore they ask whether it is possible to extend consciousness, expand consciousness - by literature, by music, by art, by drugs, by various processes. But as long as there is a centre, the observer, the thinker, the watcher, whatever he does will be within the prison walls. Right ? But there is a distance between the border and the centre,and he wants to go beyond it, transcend it, push it farther away,expand . A rubber band, you can stretch it, but if you stretch it beyond a certain point, it breaks. And when one lives in a small flat in a very crowded street and there is no open country to breathe in and no opportunity to go there, one becomes violent. The animals do this. They have territorial rights because they want space in which to hunt, and they prevent anyone else coming into that area. So, everything demands expansion - trade, insects, animals and human beings, they all must have space. Not only outwardly, but inwardly. The centre, being the prisoner of its own limitation, wants expansion. It seeks expansion through identification - with God, with an idea, with an ideal, with a formula, with a concept. And it thinks it can live differently, at a different level, though it is living in a miserable prison. And the centre being a thought tries to expand by identification with something - with the nation, with the family, with the group, with culture - you know, expand, expand. But it is still living in prison! As long as there is a centre there is no freedom. So what what happens? It invents time as a means of escape. I will gradually escape from this prison. I will practise, I will meditate, I will do this and won't do that. Gradually, tomorrow, next year, the future. It has not only created space which is limited, but also it has created time! And it has become a slave to a space and a time of its own.
Now that brings a question ,can one live without the "center"?
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Hi s_lone
What I'm saying is that as long as there is a centre,there must be time and limited space. That is a fact, as you can observe it in your daily life s_lone.You are bound to your house, to your family, to your wife, and then to the community, to society, and then to your culture and so on and so on. So this whole thing is the centre - the culture, the family, the nation.That centre has created a boundary, which is consciousness, the consciousnes is always limited.It tries to expand the boundary, to widen the walls, but the whole is still within the prison. So that is the first thing, that is what is taking place actually, in our daily life.So the question is, is it possible not to have a centre and live in the world?? What do you say?
What I'm saying is that as long as there is a centre,there must be time and limited space. That is a fact, as you can observe it in your daily life s_lone.You are bound to your house, to your family, to your wife, and then to the community, to society, and then to your culture and so on and so on. So this whole thing is the centre - the culture, the family, the nation.That centre has created a boundary, which is consciousness, the consciousnes is always limited.It tries to expand the boundary, to widen the walls, but the whole is still within the prison. So that is the first thing, that is what is taking place actually, in our daily life.So the question is, is it possible not to have a centre and live in the world?? What do you say?
Spacetime. Bit of a lame word for it, but that's what the physicists called it. Sometimes they have a lamentable lack of imagination. The point, however, is that space and time do not exist independently of each other, they are intimately bound up together in such a way that intervals in space and time between two different events will be perceived differently by different observers in ways that depend on their relative state of motion. The effect is very small at the velocities we're accustomed to dealing with, well below our sensory thresholds, because the speed of light is so big, but it's real. Astronauts who spend a week or so zipping around the earth in orbit at a few miles per second, for instance, come home a few seconds younger than they'd have been had they stayed home. Similarly, calibration signals from GPS satellites have to be adjusted for the same effect. Clocks on the satellites run more slowly than clocks on the ground.
My brother the general relativist says:
China should take some risparadal, second, that Lorentz discovered that space and time were described by what is now known as Lorentzian geometry, five years before that plagarizing fool Einstein. As to the question, they are independant and have different properties, however technically, when you increase your velocity your previous space and time axes become mixed however they still retain their distinct properties.
So, you can always tell the difference between space and time, if you're a physicist/mathematician. To us lay persons, age is an aspect of your person as much as the space you occupt is, they aren't dependant on one another.
China should take some risparadal, second, that Lorentz discovered that space and time were described by what is now known as Lorentzian geometry, five years before that plagarizing fool Einstein. As to the question, they are independant and have different properties, however technically, when you increase your velocity your previous space and time axes become mixed however they still retain their distinct properties.
So, you can always tell the difference between space and time, if you're a physicist/mathematician. To us lay persons, age is an aspect of your person as much as the space you occupt is, they aren't dependant on one another.
Your brother is wrong. There's no subject called Lorentzian geometry, Hendrik Lorentz did not discover that space and time are described by it, and space and time are not independent. Together with George Fitzgerald he developed a theory describing the change in shape of a body due to its motion, now known as the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction. It was an important contribution to the theory of relativity, one of several he made.
Your brother is possibly thinking of Georg Riemann, who developed the geometry Einstein used in General Relativity.
Your brother is possibly thinking of Georg Riemann, who developed the geometry Einstein used in General Relativity.
I can only try to answer your question China...
Living without a center would imply being the Whole, or God, or the Universe or whatever you want to call it. So... No, I don't think it is possible, in my present state, to live without a center and to be absloutely free of space and time.
Well Dex, I by no means am an authority on this subject, but it is his area of study. The book he recomended to me on this matter is called "A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity: Part I, the Classical Theories/Part Ii, the Modern Theories" by E.T. Whittaker, in particular the chapter detailing the Special Theory of Relativity of Poincare and Lorentz, which was developed before 1905.
It appears to be what the math folks call a 3-sphere, which is the 4-dimensional analog of the 2-sphere, which is more or less what we're accustomed to thinking of as the surface of a sphere. Note the qualifier though: the surface of a sphere, not the sphere itself. That's why it's called a 2-sphere: the surface has only two dimensions. The universe thus has the shape of the surface of a 4-dimensional sphere, and just as a 3-dimensional sphere's surface has no centre (though the sphere itself does), neither does the 3-sphere. Wikipedia has a lengthy article on the 3-sphere, but unless you've studied mathematics at least to the senior undergraduate level at university, I don't recommend it. It talks about quaternions and manifolds and Lie groups and other such mathematical arcana.
To S_Lone, the shape of our Universe can only be one of three possibilities. Based on the observations that the universe is both homogeneous and isotropic, Friedmann, Robertson, Walker and LeMaitre showed that the universe can be either: a) flat, b) 3-spherical or c) hyperbolic. These correspond to constant vanishing, constant positive and constant negative curvature. The cosmologists have made various measurements trying to discover which of the three cases describes our universe, and to a certain number of significant figures (I can't remember how many at the moment, but my wife could tell you) the universe appears to be flat. However, we can't see all of the universe; there are some areas of the universe where light would have to travel for longer than the age of the universe to reach us. However, regardless of the actual shape, the principals of homogeneity and isotropicness rule out the idea of a center of the universe.
To Dexter Sinister, I assume that you have an academic interest in the matter, so I will elaborate a bit on the field of differential geometry. Riemannian geometry is described by a positive-definite inner product or metric. Pseudo-Riemannian geometry, the geometry of Minkowski space, is neither positive, nor definite, nor semi-definite and admits vectors with inner products which are negative, vanishing and positive. Pseudo Riemannian metrics are also called Lorentzian metrics, since Lorentz was the first person to describe one, he was attempting to discover the symmetries of the Maxwell equations. Thus when speaking about Lorentzian geometry, we are using a scientific slang and are referring to pseudo-Riemannian geometry. Generally a physicist talks about Lorentzian geometry and a mathematician talks about a pseudo-Riemannian one. As to the Hilbert-Einstein equations, you certainly can use a Riemannian metric, but only Lorentzian metrics (pseudo-Riemannian ones) will ever describe what we refer to as a spacetime. I hope that clears up the confusion caused by the expert hostile wikipedia.
To Dexter Sinister, I assume that you have an academic interest in the matter, so I will elaborate a bit on the field of differential geometry. Riemannian geometry is described by a positive-definite inner product or metric. Pseudo-Riemannian geometry, the geometry of Minkowski space, is neither positive, nor definite, nor semi-definite and admits vectors with inner products which are negative, vanishing and positive. Pseudo Riemannian metrics are also called Lorentzian metrics, since Lorentz was the first person to describe one, he was attempting to discover the symmetries of the Maxwell equations. Thus when speaking about Lorentzian geometry, we are using a scientific slang and are referring to pseudo-Riemannian geometry. Generally a physicist talks about Lorentzian geometry and a mathematician talks about a pseudo-Riemannian one. As to the Hilbert-Einstein equations, you certainly can use a Riemannian metric, but only Lorentzian metrics (pseudo-Riemannian ones) will ever describe what we refer to as a spacetime. I hope that clears up the confusion caused by the expert hostile wikipedia.
Hmmm... Now that's a head scratcher...
Unfortunately, my knowledge of mathematics is not advanced and this is beyond my understanding, to my great dismay. But thanks for answering...
Just to check if I kind of understand what you are saying... Are you saying the universe appears to have the shape of a relatively thick surface of a sphere? Would that mean that theoretically, you could leave in a space-ship in one direction, follow the curve of the sphere and eventually come back to your point of origin?
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Yes, if the universe was a three sphere that would be the case. Also if the universe is a three sphere, only then will it end in the big crunch, otherwise it goes on expanding forever. However, the universe seems to be flat, both from Cosmic Microwave Background measurements, and cosmic shear analysis. Here is a link for a popular news article regarding CMB measurements: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/727073.stm
Poincaré and Lorentz, in attempting to explain the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, got some of the right answers but for the wrong reasons. They were still clinging to the notion of the luminiferous aether as the medium for light transmission, and when your conceptual foundation is that flawed, you don't get credit for the results. It was Einstein who showed that the aether wasn't necessary in his 1905 paper describing Special Relativity, and Hermann Minkowski who cast it into the geometrical form that was crucial to the development of the General Theory of Relativity in Einstein's 1916 paper.
There's no legitimate question of plagiarism here. Everybody read everybody else's papers and built on each others' work and cited each other in their own publications.
Thanks to you too for answering. I know I'm severely limited in my understanding and you may feel as if you are explaining economy to a rock but I will persist in my desire to understand...
Let's say the universe is flat and expanding. Wouldn't there be a point where the Big Bang originated... Would that not be the "middle" of the universe?
Yes, the expansion of the big bang is a source of confusion for many people. The best analogy is one of a balloon. Get yourself a balloon and tape some pennies to it. Then blow up the balloon. You will see that the distance between any two pennies is expanding but there is no real centre to the expansion. For a more flat model of the same idea, you can take any picture on your computer and zoom in on it. The pixels will seem to expand and non neighbouring pixels will get further and further away from each other, but there is no real centre to the expansion.
I apologize if I used too much math. I have a lot of faith in my fellow man, I am sure if you had the time and the motivation, that you could learn all of the things that I am talking about. So I try to throw out the names of the mathematical ideas just in case some day you have both the time and the motivation. In the meantime, I can always try to restrict my explanations to a less mathematical nature.
I apologize if I used too much math. I have a lot of faith in my fellow man, I am sure if you had the time and the motivation, that you could learn all of the things that I am talking about. So I try to throw out the names of the mathematical ideas just in case some day you have both the time and the motivation. In the meantime, I can always try to restrict my explanations to a less mathematical nature.