What is "time" ?

[Peter Cobbold]

1 hour ago, john.r.davies said:

Gravity?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gravitys-Arrow-Jack-Mann-ebook/dp/B07VFH67SK

Not waht I had in mind. Kip Thorne embraces gravity and General Relativity with "you fall to where time flows slowest" .but the arrrow is still forwards.

Here's a clue  Peejay4A ( above ) came very close.

[Peter Cobbold]

ENTANGLEMENT, or spooky action at a distance collides head-on with SR.  SR tells us that nothing can  travel faster than the speed of light. But two entangled particles show "instantaneous" correlated change across large distances ( even across the universe theoretically) I have failed to find an easy description but this video, if you ignore the detailed description of the theory of the expts, delivers the message. Entanglement is real, it has been measured  -using Bell's imequality principle - in maany labs and even in small pieces of material, not just particles.  Entanglement may hint at SR being incomplete: in the jargon SR is local, entanglement non-local.  Reconciling the two has lead to theories that space and time are not the fundamental landscape in which events happen

 

[Peter Cobbold]

The question I posed about the arrow of time hiding in plain site is still open. It is known to all of us, so ridiculously simple you will kick yourself when we get to the answer. The answer is also essenatial to where I will take the discussion: the very latest theories on what time and space might be.  Anyone ?

Peter

[Peter Cobbold]

8 hours ago, Peter Cobbold said:

The question I posed about the arrow of time hiding in plain site is still open. It is known to all of us, so ridiculously simple you will kick yourself when we get to the answer. The answer is also essenatial to where I will take the discussion: the very latest theories on what time and space might be.  Anyone ?

Peter

Answer:   Cause always precedes Effect

We see events playing out in time and space, cause always before effect. Could it be that we are missing something more fundamental in that relationship?  Maybe, as we shall shortly see.....

Peter

[john.r.davies]

"Cause precedes Effect"    But only because time flows in the direction we perceive.    This cannot be the driving force of Time's Arrow!

[stillp]

10 hours ago, Peter Cobbold said:

Maybe, as we shall shortly see.....

 

Or perhaps we already have...

Pete

[Peter Cobbold]

3 hours ago, john.r.davies said:

"Cause precedes Effect"    But only because time flows in the direction we perceive.    This cannot be the driving force of Time's Arrow!

You're in for a shock !

Peter

[Peter Cobbold]

What we have learned so far is that SR shows time and space to be lcoked together into 4-dimensional space-time, a continuum. SR is a  gemoetriclal construct - recall those time clocks - predicated upon the speed of light c being constant. Since space diemnsions are timeless that leads to the conclusion we occupy a Block Universe, and time permeates it as Block Time ( recall the now slices in the loaf). In block time all the past,present and future are all real. Unfortunately physicists seem to be able, because SR has great practical applications and 'works', to ignore the consequnces that block time fixes our future and denies free will. Davies and Norton articles cited earlier show the divide. Most of us will be in the Norton camp:" Of course time flows".  SR collides head-on with the world of particles because it impses a max speed ( c : 300,000 km.sec) at which anything can move including information. But the experimantally measured phenomenon of quantum entanglement shows correlated action of two particles insntansously across large disnances. The best measremntyet shows entanlged particles would need information to transferat 10,000 tiems the speed of light. SR forbids this "spooky action at a distance".  This is a fundamental conundrum in physics. SR and entanglement both are suppoerted by precise measurements, neither can be regarded as wrong. What might the answer be?

In the next post I will attempt to describe a new theory by an eminent theroretical physicist who takes the view, broadly that tiem does really flow and that SR is incomplete\; there is something deeper than space and time. In the jargon: space and time are "emergent" not fundamental. What do they emerge from?

 

Peter

 

[Peter Cobbold]

The theory that time and space are consequent upon deeper, simpler level is due to Lee Smolin and Marina Cortes.  Their concept is that of Energetic Causal Sets comprising particles of energy with momentum that create events, BUT these events are not happening in space, they create the 'ticks' of time, and create space. This is the most acccessible description Ive found; https://plus.maths.org/content/future-time

In the first video Marina Cortes describes the blobk universe. In  the second the idea of Energetic Causal Sets, pay especail attantionat 3:50

I;ll try to find an intelligible article. There was one in NS by Smolin maybe a year ago but its paywalled.

Peter

[Peter Cobbold]

Try this, Cortes comes in about halfway

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-time-got-its-arrow/

 

[Peter Cobbold]

Excerpts form NS and a Perimeter Inst talk by Smolin,

 

[Peter Cobbold]

lest I give the impression that Cortes and Smolin's energetci causal sets are the only view of tiime, here are some others, mosly quesitoning the block universe

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-debate-over-the-physics-of-time-20160719/

Time for UFOs next.

Peter

 

[Peter Cobbold]

Time for UFOs.  The overwhelming majority of scientists and most of the public dismiss UFOs as , variosuly, hoaxes, Venus, 'new age' wishful thinking, aircraft, balloons, rentry space junk,droens, helicopters, fireworks, marsh gas etc. And people who are brave enough to reporta sighitng  or experience are myopic, narcissists seeking attention ( or profit) ,delusional cranks, or worse. I was not immune for most ofmy profesional life from disregarding UFOs and "ET". I do recall 50 yars ago thinking 'thats odd' when I read  Lonely Sea and  Sky by Francis Chichester. And for 30 years I dismissed my wife's experience as a helicopter search light. About 8 years ago she took to watching Balze and Quest programmes on UFOs, still mystified by what had been a frightening event. Now thos progas are truly terrible, but a few mentioned classical sightings such as Nash& Fortenberry that I followed up. Today, with well over 100 books, mostly classics, read and re-read I am convinced that 95% of UFOs are mundane. But 5% are truly inexplicable, and ignored by science. My reading has embraced UFOs of a recognisable range of shape and size that defy physics, USOs , numerous reports of abductions ( with a consistent motive), abductees being floated through closed windows or doors, or up a beam of light, humanoids that to a biologist are "not alien enough", and telepathic communication.  I chose to delve deeper to try to find a way inot these high strangeness phenomena, doubting that many thousands of my fellow humans who reported their strange experiences could  all be dismissed as cranks. Like any biologist faced with strange data I looked for patterns , and having a prior interest in "time"  found tentative pattern.  The hypothesis is that, somehow by means unknown to us, UFOs manipulate the flow of time, both faster and slower than our familiar flow of time.

I gave a talk ot the local U3As, the last one is here, and we will go though it slide by slide in the following  posts. We have already covered what physics knows about "time" so we are now in a position to recognise the high strangeness of the time anomalies displayed by UFOs and abductees.We will cover slides 1 to 47

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ctf3J2CeWKlE5iPCuHyS0dj4MNoxxJq9/view

 

Peter

[Peter Cobbold]

Chichester's UFO was 1931: http://www.auforn.com/Bill_Chalker_27.htm

the engine misfire is not unusuall.BUFORA list 900+ instnaces of  vehicle engine failing, concievably due to e-m interference. BUFORA also list many examples of headlights going out, and relighting whne the ufo goes  away. How that is done remotely is unknown.

Peter

[Peter Cobbold]

Physicists have a saying "time is what a clock measures", implying that the flwo of time is illusory. However there are examples of surrogate clcoks in my talk. Valdes' stubble growth and wrist watch indicated that during his absence more time had passed than for his platoon of soldiers. There is another example from China where a vanished soldier re-appeared aftter a few hours having grown a beard: ( the Yunnan UFO connection)

http://theozfiles.blogspot.com/2017/07/peter-khoury-and-hair-of-alien-25th.html 

in both instances time for the experiencer was compacted: more seconds had passed compared with "ambient time".

The opposite was seen for Vallee's Italian engineer: his clocks ( shirt, flower in buttonhole, clean shaven) indicated hours had passed for him while ambient time had passed many days, long enough for him to have been severely dehydrated. In this instance time for the experiencer was expanded: each second for him lasted many seconds of ambient time.

As a working hypothesis I claim that not only does tiem flow but it can flow either compacted or expanded comppared with our familiar ambient time. Realtivictic time dilation is unlikely to provide an explanation as we will see in two high strangeness events,one of whcih is abductee "LInda Cortile"'s swimming pool experience, slide 37  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ctf3J2CeWKlE5iPCuHyS0dj4MNoxxJq9/view

Peter

 

[Peter Cobbold]

Aside

One of the most respected ufologists is Jacques Vallee. Unlke the amjority if ufo researshers he does not promote extraterrestrial origins, I share that interpretation as we will see towards the end of the thread.  Vallee has amassed reports dating back centuries, listed here

http://paul.rutgers.edu/~mcgrew/ufo/magonia/magtdb01/magonia.txt

Enjoy ! but dont expect any explanations from me !   France 1954 is mind boggling.

Peter

[Peter Cobbold]

Back to "time".  

There are two near identical observations of, hypothetically, extreme time anomalies in which time for the experiencers was compacted ca 10,000-fold.  One is Linda Cortile's swimming pool exeprience in NY, the other was four friends in a coffee bar in Dunedin. I arrived at 10,000=fold on the basis of needing a photo exposure of ca 1/000 th sec  to freeze water splashes or steam, andca 10secs guesstiimate that walking past the pool or the queue took.   Physicists knee-jerk reaction would be to attribute time  anomalies ot relativity. But that is not valid for  these two events;  why ?

 

Dunedin 1975, July 12 th #153:   http://www.ignaciodarnaude.com/avistamientos_ovnis/Humanoid sighting reports in 1975,Albert Rosales.htm

"Richard Williams" and three of his friends, Pat S, Nancy T, and Ross K were having lunch together at a coffee bar called "Stewarts" located on the south side of Dunedin's Octagon. On that day the weather was cold and damp and all of the participants were feeling a bit under the weather, with headaches, etc. They sat around the table located opposite the stairs and quietly ate their lunches. All of the sudden time stood still. The noisy and busy coffee bar occupied by about 80 people turned into an absolutely silent place where everything froze. It looked like a still frame from a movie film. People were twisted in strange positions, frozen whilst performing movements. Their bodies looked comic and their positions seemed to be very unstable. Richard remembered a cloud of steam suspended motionlessly in a dynamic configuration above the expreso machine. He also remembered a waitress pulling out burning hot cakes from the oven, and sustaining their heat in the motionless hands. In the whole café only the four of them seemed to remain non affected, thus having the occasion to observe what actually happened. At the top of the stairs that led down to the coffee bar from street level an unusual man appeared. He was about 1.75 meters high and looked about 19 years old. He was dark, slim, thin, with olive skin and black wavy hair. His clothes looked normal, but displayed high taste and elegance. Everything about him looked strikingly perfect. The man was surrounded by a beautiful white glow, especially around his head and chest. The light seemed to be emitted not from him, but from the air that surrounded him. He glided down the stairs without moving his legs. He actually floated in the air slightly above the level of the stairs. Then he moved to the counter and stood first in the queue. As soon as he got there, everything started to happen normally again. People continued their actions from the point when they were suspended in motion. Everything looked as though nothing had happened. The man bought a glass of fruit juice and sat at the last free chair left at a 12-person table. He acknowledged the witnesses attention with a smile. They wanted to talk to him and find out more about his unusual arrival but there was no access to his chair..............................

 

Once relativity has been dismissed we will dissect the phenomena in more depth

Peter

[john.r.davies]

Peter,

This is a psychiatric condition, not one in physics.     People's perceptions are not evidence of disturbances in time.

See: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140624-the-man-who-saw-time-freeze

John

[Peter Cobbold]

1 hour ago, john.r.davies said:

Peter,

This is a psychiatric condition, not one in physics.     People's perceptions are not evidence of disturbances in time.

See: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140624-the-man-who-saw-time-freeze

John

John,  I cant rule that out. However the effect was experiencd by four witnesses in Dunedin, so simultaneous pathology seems improbable. I have experienced time slowing just prior  to a collision, a heightened state of awarness, and it is conceivalbe that such was somehow induced in the four friends. Indeed telepathic messaging is commonplace in those experiencing high strangness events, so that type of intervention may be in play ( but goodness knows how)      The  reason I favour time anomay is because of the Valdes, Yunnan and hte Italian engineer, where psychiatric explanaitons do  not apply.  I must point out thet I am formulating a working hyopthesis, taking an ensemble view of putative time anomalies. There  are other observations yet to come that defy the psychological interpretion.   Taken in isolation you are quite right, and tks for the link, fascinating.

Peter

[Peter Cobbold]

Why are the swimming pool and Dunedin putative time anomalies not explicable by Special Realtivity? Becasue the witnesses are not moving at very high speed relative to the ambient environment especially w ater splashes and the steam. Nor did they experience wieghtlessness that would be anticippated form General Relativity. We have not covered GR but it is nealty summed up bt Nobel laureate Kip Thorne: " You fall to where time flows slowest". The four witnesses did nto descibe any sense of weight change so a gravity/GR effect  cna be ruled out.

Dissecting the phenomenon leads us into territory that has been invoked in theoretical physics, as follows:

A 10,000-fold compaction of time would mean the light intensity experience by the 4 witnesses would drop at the start of the aberration. This was not reported, possible because the eye iris responds within  1/20 th sec.

The most interesting observation is the lack of colour-change. Indeed ambient light from the steam etc at visible frequncies would be expected upon entering the witnesses' time domain to shift 10,000-fold ( ie 10 ^4-fold) lower frequency , turning into radio-waves  https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/e/electromagnetic+spectrum   which would not be visible.

Another observation is the witnesses did not cook. Temperature is a measure of molecular motion, so compacted time with moore seconds per ambient second would be expected to raise the witnesses temperature, but did not.

It may be significant that both frequncy ( expressed as wavelength) and  temperature involve not only time but space too. Could space be changed along with time? Geomteric space was not altered, the swimming pool and cafe did not visible shrink or  expand. So how might the effective space  be reduced 10,000-fold to satisfy these anomalies ?  Here we depart into theoretical physics and the proposal that space is not smooth but pixellated at scales that scince has never been able to measure. If space is divided into pixels ( better, "voxels" of volume) a quantum partcile such asa photon would jump instantaneosly voxel to voxel. Conceivably along with time compacting 10,000 -fold, the voxelisation of space was also coarsened  10,000--fold. There woulde be 10,000-fold  fewer  voxels in the witnesses time-domain thereby preserving the wavelenght of light unchanged.  Pixellation of space,. formally called quantisation of space-time, is an important concept in "loop quantum gravity", as this over-view explains

Needless to say I doubt that any phyisicist working on LQG has ever read about the swimming pool of coffee bar phenomena. And if thya had would not be interested as these high strangeness happenings are ultr-rare and not actionable. Howoever there are examples of high strangeness events that can be studied for time anomalies. There are simple tests that would test  the concept of anomalous flow of time. But first we need to assemble evidence that the flow of time can be influenced locally, in wound healing. Watch this space

Peter

[john.r.davies]

Groups of people, sometimes in thousands, have 'witnessed' miracles, Peter.     You have to be a true believer to accept that as truth.

John

[Peter Cobbold]

John,

You fail to grasp the approach I take. Truth is not part of it. I do  not believe anything as true except in that whcih is measurable and consonant with the current body of science. Even then my beliefs are modifiable as new evdience emerges.  ALL the phenomena described in this thread may be real, or not. I do not believe them but nor do I dismiss them off-hand. I am assembling a working hypothesis that can be, as we shall see, tested by measurements. That is the scientifc method I follow: an open mind. Closed minds get us nowhere.

Peter

 

[Peter Cobbold]

The phenomenon of abduction into UFOs is rejected by many ufo enthusiasts, largely because of reliance upon hypnotic recall and the exootic claims of  contactees. However after reading Hopkins, Mack and Jacobs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_abduction

I embraced the wealth of information with an open mind. Surgical manoevres, non consensual. are a common thread in abductions, and unexplained healed  scars ahve been reported immediatelt afterwards, implying aberrantly f ast wound-healing. However most abductees  are understnadable fearful of ridicule and detailed studies are lacking. I know of only one instance where greatly accelerated wound healing has been observed outsied the confines of a UFO and without hypnosis.http://peterkhoury8.blogspot.com/2013/08/1988-experience-peter-khoury-president.html

In the context of the workign hypothesis the flow of tiem for that wound would need tobe compacted ca 100-fold.

The possibilty that time might flow faster locally in tissue also comes from the account of skin numbness after a witness handled white material left behind by  a landed ufo at Delphos, KS, 191. A partial analysis ahs been made :  https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/763816/UFO-landed-earth-proof-Delphos-Dr-Erol-Faruk

I could surmise the white materail was a skin-numbing local anaesthetci discarded by the ufo, but prefer to follow the working hypothesis that this is another example of aberrant local time-flow in the white material. Nerve endings in skin encode mechanical pressure with brief  action potentials in the nerve axon. If the white powder induced compacted time locally in the skin the potentails may heve been to brief to propaget alon nerves remote from the time-affected site, and a sensation of numbness resulted

The take home message is the possibiltiy tiem anomalies may persist without the need for a UFO ot be present.   This  could be very useflu whne it comes ot measuring aberrant  time, and putting the working hypothesis to the test, next.

Peter

[Peter Cobbold]

Aside:  Are UFOs ET's, or are 'they' closer to home?

It is almost universally assumed that UFOs are the construct of inter-stellar of even inter-galactic extra-terrestrials. My view is their biology is "not alien enough", the oft-reported Grey resembling a 4 foot tall 3-month human foetus. A  deeper analyis has been made by Dr Jacques Vallee, a pioneer of  computing and  astronomer etc, and a lifelong expert on UFO phenomena:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vallée

He was portrayed by Truffaut in the film Close Encounters of the Third KInd.

Vallee's assessment of the non-ET nature of the phenomenon is here:

https://www.jacquesvallee.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Five_Arguments_Against_the_Extraterrestr-1.pdf

We shouldbe asking, if not ET where are they ?

Peter

 

 

 

[Peter Cobbold]

Testing, testing....

The working hypothesis s that high strangeness events may involve manipulationf of the flow of time and this may be local and persist after the ufo is no longer  present. UFOs are rare and attempting ot use GPS signals to test time anomalies is nto feasible for the solitary investigator, though the military may have know this for decades. The approach ot memasuring time anomalies I have taken requiries we ennter the strange world oof crop circles. Mostly derided as hoaxes by journos andd hence ignored by "real scisntists" crop formations may in part be hoaxes but there are examples that cannot conceivable be faked: Stonehenge, East Field and Cherhill Down.http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/anasazi/time2012a.html    The link between CFs and UFOs is tenuous, however UFOs have a proensity for vanishing on the spot, so CFs being formed by an invisble agency makes a sufficient link for me to pursue. UFOs also generate spectaculr light shows including beams and ball of light, both of which have  been assocaited with  Cfs forming.

In the appendix to Dr Horace Drew's article we see photos of bent but not crushed rape seed ( Canola) stems. The stem is fibrous similar to celery and would not be expected to be bendable by short-term forces, I am working on the hypothesis that compacted time has allowed bending force to redirec the growth and the large number of seconds allowed rapid growth that would be impossible in ambient time. The holes in wheat and barley nodes may have a similar origin, if the outer stem layers of cells elongate faster than deeper layers. Bent rahther than fractured stem of mature cereals may also be the result of complying with a bending fore appllied over alarge number of minutes of comapcted time. The f ew minutes of ambient tiem needed to form a CF maym in UFO time be days , recall Dunedin.

CFs appear in Sussex, Hants, Wilts each summer, and across the world. If time anomalise persist in the plant material after the actual event ( recall wound healing) bench measurements may provide the first test of the hypothesis and the first scientific evidence that  the flow of time is real and furthermore nto fixed at "1 second per second".  

I have assembled the kit I need to make the measuremnts and have an experienced crop cilce enthusiast to keep tabs on formations as soon as they are spotted.  However my helath precludes charging aorund the souterhn counties ot    gather material. So should you care ot get involved this summer (lockdoen rules permittint) by collecting samples and mailing them to me, do please send me a PM.

Peter