Jumping the Timestream – A Note from 08-09-2012

Because no one can be certain about one’s own ability to participate in the future, I have a couple of ideas in the works that I’d like to post to the future just in case I (for some reason) don’t get around to it before then. 

First amongst these is this, an idea Chris Hackman and I developed while young astrophysics majors at the Univerisity of Wyoming in early 2000: 

The Antithetic Force

In my view the so-called Hubble Constant is in dire need of a reevaluation in the context of Dark Energy.  I believe the two phenomena are actually the same, and further, that they together represent the evidence of Gravity’s “missing pole” – that is, the push to balance gravity’s pull.  (In other words, “antigravity.”)

I call this force “Antithy,” which as I propose it is a fundamental property of matter – a repulsive force that increases in strength proportionally with distance (i.e., the father away two objects are from one-another, the more strongly they repel).  This is in direct conceptual opposition to Gravity, which is a fundamental property of matter – an attractive force that decreases in strength proportionally with distance (i.e., the closer together two objects are from one-another, the more strongly they attract). 

At first blush, this proposition seems impossible, as soon all objects would be accelerated from one-another beyond the speed of light and the universe quickly undergoes infinite expansion.  However, this conclusion is made without considering the very important spacetime curvature implications of General Relativity.  When looking at the cosmological implications of an Antithetic force from a higher-dimensional context, one quickly realizes that such a force produces an initially-expanding but self-closing universe.  The closure quickly solves Antithy’s own problem, for once closed, the Antithetic Force works in all directions, supplying a sort of repulsive pressure across the universe to counteract initial expansion and shepherd all of the matter in the universe into equilibrium positions with respect to all other matter (like a web of repulsive magnets on the surface of a sphere). 

With this in mind, on small cosmological scales, Gravity dominates.  On large cosmological scales, Antithy dominates.  Thus, Gravity/Antithy is not the weakest but the strongest fundamental force.

I strongly suspect that Antithy is why a consistent value for the Hubble Constant proves perpetually elusive, and Antithy supplies an additional force to explain the nature of “galactic bubbling” in cosmological structure as well as explain the presence of a force attributable to pervasive “dark matter.” 

There you go.  I’m trying as hard as I can to get this proposition into a publication for critical review, but tempus fugit. 

Consider this post a backup for posterity.

Cheers,

Ben McGee

August 9, 2012; 03:00pm

Temporal Mechanics (Time update part 2)

Asilomar chapel where I gave my first Temporal Mechanics talk at the International Society for the Study of Time's triennial conference, 7/30/2007. (Credit: Ben McGee)

Things have been fairly one-sided here on the ol’ astrowright blog for a while.  What with beginning classes in UND’s space studies program and with upcoming coursework in radiophysics at Oregon State, (which I hope to integrate into orbital/lunar radiation work,) it’s no surprise that I’ve been a bit hyper-focused on space science.

However, today I wanted to take a step back and pick up where I left off regarding my other scientific passion, time research.

So, we last left our time discussion with an apparent contradiction: Most of theoretical physics leads us to consider that time is an illusion and does not physically exist.  The past versions of the universe are not “saved” somewhere for us to go back to, and the future does not yet exist.  There is only the now.   However,  Relativity shows us (in repeated experiments!) that the time experienced by something changes depending on its motion, (time slows as speed increases,) meaning that some part of time must physically exist, and furthermore, it must be related to physical motion.

That brings us to the crux of my theoretical, time-centered physics work.  Temporal Mechanics, as I have developed it as a functioning theoretical framework, relates to and is derived from a single question:

• “What if there is more to the concept of time than we acknowledge or are aware?”

As hinted in my previous time post, Temporal Mechanics goes on to posit that the physical part of what we call time and what we call motion are actually two views of the same phenomenon.  -Namely, that the apparent 3D motion of an object is the result of it moving through time (4D) at a different rate than its frame of reference.  I called this the Fundamental Principle of Temporal Kinematics.

The exciting part is that when you take this kernel and start marching it through physics, many very, very interesting things happen.

For starters, you can start answering unanswerable questions, like digging into Newtonian mechanics staple “f = ma” (force equals mass times acceleration).  If one were to ask, “Why does the application of force to a mass cause acceleration?” in the Standard Model, this is a nonsense question.  It’s simply how acceleration is defined. It is by nature an unanswerable question.

And in science, at least for me, I find these sorts of conceptual impasses troubling.

However, if motion is now the result of a temporal rate differential, (as defined by the Fundamental Principle of Temporal Kinematics,) then an answer suddenly shows up:  The application of force to a mass causes a temporal acceleration which appears to a 3D observer as motion of the mass.

Voila.  An answer where there was none.

A trick of wordplay?  Perhaps.  But think Orwell’s 1984 – it is true that the words we use to define concepts limit the concepts we use to define a reality.  If there actually are deeper physical truths to the ideas of time and motion, right now we are linguistically incapable of describing them.  Perhaps just “opening up” our conceptual language can reveal truths idly sitting beneath our comprehension, waiting for us to get around our own mental roadblocks and see them.

The adventure continues, reaching all the way back to Aristotle’s work on time and motion.  It turns out that he came within mere inches of posing Temporal Mechanics’s fundamental principle more than two thousand years ago.  Basically, he noticed that we measure that time has occurred by measuring uniform motion, (e.g., a ticking watch,) and that we measure that motion has occurred by measuring uniform time, (e.g., using a stopwatch to measure how fast someone has run a lap.)  Clearly the two are inseparable.  It only took advanced astronomy and the idea of Relativity to break the concepts of time and motion out of their separate Newtonian prisons and back toward each other.

For a future post, the fundamental principle kernel continues its radical march through physics, linking and actually predicting both quantum indeterminism and the bizarre distortions at extreme speeds known as “relativistic effects,” and while using the same mathematics and data, the kernel leads to an alternate interpretation of the Twin Paradox that, (at least according to time,) would allow travel faster than light speed.

Stay tuned.