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4D Spacetime or 3D Space/Time?

Posted on Monday, May 2, 2011 at 10:45AM by Registered CommenterDoug | CommentsPost a Comment

We’ve heard it for so long and in so many ways that we have become inured to it, but I happened across an old BBC documentary on Youtube last night, and decided to watch once more as Brian Cox explained the nature of time in spacetime to his audience.

He tried to explain that even though time is treated as a 4th dimension in Einstein’s spacetime, it’s treated a little bit differently than a magnitude with the three dimensions of space is treated, because its magnitude has a minus sign in the equation.

It reminded me of an earlier video I had watched in which Brian and Max Tegmark discussed the same thing. Tegmark observed that, if it weren’t for that minus sign, there would be no point in having a brain, because we wouldn’t be able to predict anything.

But that’s a double-edged sword, because as Brian explains in his BBC documentary, since Einstein’s time dimension is continuous and one-dimensional, everything is present - past, present and future - and we just travel along the ribbon of time that leads to all the events of our life, which already exist, waiting only for our arrival. The minus sign keeps us from stopping and reversing.

It’s this nonsense that the LST community has bought into that drives thinking people away, to look for something better. When we take Larson’s assumption that time and space don’t exist independently, but are the reciprocal aspects of the one single component of the universe, motion, we can see intuitively that it’s a better course to take.

The thing is, LST defenders of the unification of space and time into 4D spacetime argue that it has been proven and even incorporated into technology like GPS. However, as I watched the documentary, I wondered why they couldn’t see that what they think of as the spacetime warp is simply a result of motion that is not readily apparent.

But just as in Hollywood films, where the film makers straighten out the curved trajectory of tracers from the guns of fighter planes turning, twisting and rolling in aerial combat, for esthetic reasons, scientists seem to prefer the sight of the pretty lines in their rubber bed sheet illustrations, curved by the weight of large masses, to the image of the eternal motion of expanding space and time.

The truth is, however, there is no rubber bed sheet, and there is no fixed set of future events, waiting for our arrival. The 3D expansion of space and time is eternal, and the course of an aggregate of matter in this expansion is more like a fish swimming upstream, than a bowling ball depressing a bed sheet.

The motion of the observed expansion is scalar; that is, it has no specific direction or dimension, but expands in all dimensions and therefore in all directions. The expansion at a given location stops when it oscillates in all dimensions, expanding/contracting in 3D space over 0D time alternately, in the case of our SUDR, and 3D time over 0D space, in the case of our TUDR (see here).

At first thought, we might object to the idea that a given location in the expansion could be oscillating. Why is a given location oscillating as opposed to any other location? and what, or who, caused it to oscillate? Of course, there are no answers to those questions, any more than there are to the questions, Why does a given particle exist, and why does it spin or oscillate the way it does?

No, the only question that makes sense is “What difference does the 3D oscillation make in our development of physical theory?” The answer to this question is just beginning to be explored. It boils down to substituting the vectorial motions of ill-defined points for the scalar motions associated with consistently defined points. Both kinds of motions are simply ways of describing changing space and changing time, but the former has been developed into a highly sophisticated science, from which all our modern technology emanates, while the latter is nothing more than a glimmer of hope, born out of a desire to find a more intuitive way.

As it turns out, the mysteries of some very fundamental issues have been exposed, having to do with some very fundamental equations. Mysteries like the reality of 4 π rotation and the strange mathematical relation of square roots and integers in the periodic energy relations of the elements.

Certainly there is more to come, but whether or not we will be able to reach the goal of explaining the atomic spectra with it or not is anybody’s guess, at this point in time. I hope so, though, because, if we do, we will have a whole new physical model of the atom to work with. One in which scalar motions replace forces, and in which gravity can be explained as a straightforward property of mass. 

If we succeed, the theoretical universe will retain its causality, but without locking in the future. The importance of the minus sign in Einstein’s equations will be greatly diminished I think.

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