What Is Time?

Chapter 4

More Problems

The physicists have difficulty with time even though many of their descriptions of physical systems claim to trace changes in time. Time is not really understood; but then, there are a lot of things that are not understood. According to Alex Unzicker, a German who has acquired the mantle of the boy pointing out the nakedness of the emperor, the Standard Model leaves many problems unanswered. The Standard Model was proposed over half a century ago and claims to explain the universe (except for gravity). As Unzicker points out the Standard Model does not compute masses of fundamental particles, their lifetimes if they are not stable, the infinities in electrodynamics, the origins of gravity, antimatter, and spin, and the nature of space and time.

Unzicker goes even further. He claims many physicist are using mathematics to obfuscate their ignorance and to gild swamps of fantasies in the same manner some economists use mathematics to hide their prejudices and ignorances in favor of their wealthy donors. In this

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sense physicists appear worse than any of the phony Nobel Prize economists since no wealthy donor really gives a damn about the lifetime of a radioactive particle or the mass of an electron. The donors (militaries, governments, etc.) only seem to care about the physicists' bombs; the ability of blow everything straight to hell.

Unzicker could also be seen as Don Quixote, tilting with windmills to no avail. The emperor and the windmill are conventional physics, which used to hold the position in academies as the emperor. Perhaps it has lost its position in the U. S. to American Studies, Gender Studies, or Black Studies; disciplines that will put up with no questioning or criticism and police that which is allowed and that which must be canceled and censored in the name of identity politics and anti-racism. However, none of this doesn't mean Unzicker is not correct.

In particular, Unzicker believes it is a mistake to conflate time with the spatial dimensions as is done in Minkowski's space, which is designed to incorporate the constancy of the speed of light in a four dimensional space. Minkowski space is really quite strange since the time dimension requires multiplication by the square root of minus one and a constant that gives the speed of light. Unzicker believes time should be treated

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separately from length, height, and width because it only flows in one direction. The spatial dimensions don't flow at all and allow backward and forward motions at will.

Unzicker, and others have formulated general relativity in three dimensional spaces with a variable speed of light to agree with Einstein's statement that the motion of light depends on its position in the gravity field and that special relativity is only correct in the absence of gravity.

The mathematics of differential geometry, Riemann geometry, and tensor calculus were developed before relativity theory. Mathematicians generalize their ideas and results as much as possible; and it's easy to extend differential geometry and tensor calculus to any whole number of dimensions. Therefore it may have been natural for Minkowski to try to incorporate the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment in a 4-space; even though the inclusion of time requires the odd (from the point of view of physical phenomenology) factors of the square root of minus one and the speed of light. Initially Einstein did not put special relativity in Minkowski's space; however he used four-space in his later development of general relativity in a four dimensional metric space probably due to the influence of

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mathematicians and the prior existence of differential geometry. The space metrics of the resulting space indicate the curvature of space due to the presence of matter; but the physical meaning of the elements of the metric involving time, the fourth dimension, are more obscure.

Newton seems to have developed his theory of gravity and the mathematics of calculus in tandem, as needed to describe the ellipsoidal orbits of the planets observed

by Kepler. Calculus, at least in somewhat its current form, did not exist before Newton and Leibnitz. Currently the fashion in theoretical physics is to apply finished mathematics to physical problems and hope all the necessary assumptions actually describe the physical situation at least in some reasonable approximation.

There are other unsolved problems not mentioned in Unzicker's criticism of the Standard Model, which may involve our understanding, or rather our lack of understanding, of time. Our local galaxy and other galaxies appear to be rotating far faster than they should be rotating given the amount of mass visible in them. The usual solution is the postulation of dark matter that can not be seen, but which is still able to effect galactic gravitational fields and cause the rotation anomaly. This additional matter can not be

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seen, so it's called dark matter. This is reminiscent of the addition of extra epicycles in Ptolemaic astronomy to account for the unusual and anomalous movements of other planets as seen from the Earth. The idea that everything might not be rotating around the Earth was never entertained or was even considered heretical. The use of a galactic clock based on the rotation of the Milky Way throws our present system of measuring time in question. Therefore dark matter is considered a better solution.

Also, it is surprising that time is treated in the same way in both quantum and relativity theory; the two theories treating the large and the small. It is also surprising that there have to be two different theories treating big things and small. It is even more surprising that the two theories don't appear to be compatible in any way; in other words, it is hard to see now one theory merges into the other in mesoscopic objects, objects halfway in size between an electron and a galaxy. What is a classical object, one that obeys relativity and Newton's physics in an approximation? Both superconductors and superfluids can be fairly large yet seem to have some of the properties of quantum objects. In quantum field theory, an extension of quantum mechanics purportedly covering very small systems with many particles that may appear and disappear in various atomic processes,

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the number operator is a global entity describing the system and its entire surroundings. The number of particles in the system may vary depending on the motion of the observer's co-ordinate system in a curved space. And in quantum theory in ordinary space, the wave function is taken to describe the entire system to be described out to infinity. The wave function is global; yet in Einstein's equation of general relativity all the quantities refer to fields at each point in space and time. In other words, the metrics, curvatures of space, and stress tensor are microscopic point-to-point mathematical objects. Yet relativity is taken to describe large objects. Isn't this strange?

(continued 10/4/2021)