Uncommon Sense

March 23, 2026

Is Time an Illusion?

Filed under: Education,Philosophy,Reason,Science — Steve Ruis @ 11:49 am
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If you read a lot and are curious, especially about nature and our existence, you will read things like “time is an illusion,” along with “free will is an illusion” and “reality is an illusion.” Clearly, illusions fascinate us. But are we deluding ourselves about them? Mostly, I think so, yes.

According to Einstein, time is a dimension and that it can be physically linked to the three spatial dimensions. Let’s look at this in the context of the “time is an illusion” claim.

If I give you a common brick and ask you how long it is, how wide it is, and how thick it is (Of course I would also give you a tape measure or ruler to make these measurements), you will automatically turn it and measure the longest side and call that the length, then the next shorter side, and call it the width, and the shortest side and call it the thickness. The standard brick, at least in this country, measures 2.25 inches, by 3.625 inches, by 8 inches. They were trying for 2˝ x 4˝ x 8˝ but just missed a little bit, or maybe they were leaving some room for mortar, who knows?

So, we talk about the three spatial dimensions: length, width, thickness or height and assume that those three measurements are at right angles to one another. Is that necessary? Need they be at exactly right angles to one another? The simple answer is “no.” The more complicated answer is that any of the other possibilities makes measuring stuff more difficult, so the right angles are for our convenience; they are not dictated by nature. Measurements of “distance” or “length” are measurements of extent through space. For an object like a brick, we can use those measures of distance to determine the volume of the brick, using the formula I am sure you learned in grade school: l x w x h = V. So, do these things, these measurements, exist for all objects? For example, what are the length, width, and height of a sphere? Apparently these three “spatial” dimensions do not apply to all objects. (How would you hold the sphere to measure its length, for example?)

Are these three dimensions physically linked? It is hard to see how. If you think they are please describe the nature of the link. I suspect many of you will think right away of the Cartesian Coordinate System (see illustration below). That shows they are linked, right? Wrong. That is just an artificial construct, a way of arranging the three dimensions in an orderly fashion, which is not dictated by Nature.

This system does, however, allow for the use of these dimensions to locate objects “in space.” An example is the map to pirate treasure which always says something like this: “Starting at the large oak tree, walk twelve paces to the north, then 14 paces to the west, then dig down four feet. Thar be the treasure!” So, given three “dimensions” on a Cartesian Coordinate System and a starting point, you can locate another point in relation to the starting point … if you have established formal directions such as North and West (up and down are defined by gravity). So, there are many, many, many artificial aspects to these “dimensions,” but since we are so used to using them a certain way, as the brick example shows, they seem to be dictated by Nature.

So, the three spatial dimensions aren’t fused/joined/linked by nature but by us. Three spatial dimensions are the minimum to locate something in 3-D space. (And 3-D is shorthand for … “three-dimensional,” don’t you know?) In 2-D space, the minimum is two and 1-D space the minimum is one. But this is tricksy. If I ask you to find a particular spot on a buried pipeline in your backyard and I give you the minimum information/measurement of 6.4 feet, will you be able to find that point. Maybe, but I doubt it. You will also need a starting point (to measure 6.4 feet from) and a direction. The pipeline may have been laid at an angle in your yard and if I tell you, the point you need to find is 6.4 feet from the fence, you are going to ask: Which fence (left, right, or rear)? and “From where on the fence?” and “In what direction?” The pipeline may be straight (being quasi one-dimensional), but being buried in a 3-D backyard, to get where you are going, you need a starting point and a direction.

So, time? What is time? It is not an illusion; we can say that. A definition of an illusion is: “a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses” (Source: Oxford Languages). Now, realize that all of our senses are at best approximate. If I asked you about the dimensions of that brick but gave you no measuring stick/tape, what would your accuracy expectations be? The same is for time. We use clocks so we don’t have to measure in real time. As to measuring in real time, the eminent physicist, Richard Feynman, could be sitting with you over a glass of wine having a splendid conversation, about physics, of course, and then tell you how many minutes and seconds it has been since you sat down (he trained himself to measure elapsed times).

Time is our measurement of duration. For example, how many minutes do you think it takes to cook a 3-minute egg? When was the last Egyptian pharaoh (aka King/Queen) alive? (It was almost 2056 years ago.)

Is there a starting point for time? Not dictated by nature, there is not. (Hence the clumsy BC/AD and BCE/CE dating schemes.)

Now, can the “dimension” of time which does not exist be physically linked to the three spatial dimensions (that are arbitrary human concoctions)? If so, I have never heard anyone explain how that is possible. And just having a clock running next to the spatial coordinates of some thing doesn’t qualify. So, why is talk of “space-time” so prevalent? Good question. For many it is that a really bright man came up with it and we don’t understand it, so we just go with the flow. For others it is basically “because it makes the math of physical theories work.” Hello? Making the math work is a clue … but not an explanation. And then there are people who take the concept and run with it, even off of cliffs. Current cosmogony theories involve space time expanding, even accelerating. Consider that space-time is not a thing. It has no physical existence other than in our heads. Things, material things, expand and contract … concepts, not so much.

I know I am somewhat of a dinosaur, but when I was taught physics and chemistry, the rule of thumb was that when a theory required more and more “patches” to make it work, and the patches were less and less comprehensible (Hello, dark matter and dark energy and cosmic inflation, etc.), it was time to take that theory and do a frame-off restoration or find another, better one.

December 21, 2024

Making Space-Time Work

Filed under: Reason,Science — Steve Ruis @ 10:38 am
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It is claimed that Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity replaced Newton’s gravitational theory. Newton’s theory described the force of gravity, while Einstein said “Force, what force, space-time is distorted by embedded masses and so moving objects instead of moving in straight lines, move along the curved lines of space-time.

A common example used to distinguish these two ideas is an orbiting satellite, like the moon or the ISS. In Newtonian physics, the satellite moves in a straight line unless acted upon by a force. The force involved was gravity, which was a pull on the satellite causing its path to change. In effect the satellite is pulled “down” toward the Earth but it keeps missing it because of its “sideways” movement.

In Einstein’s physics, there is no force, the satellite is travelling along a “straight” line of curved space-time, giving the appearance of a force acting when there is really no force. (Think of a NASCAR race on a steeply banked track. When the cars enter the banked parts of the track, they don’t have to turn their steering wheels much or at all because the slant of the track imparts the turn needed.)

Okay, here is my problem with Einstein’s conception of “gravity.” Starting with a board at a slant (see illustration below). We all know if the ball is in such a position, if it is free to move, it will roll down the plane. But in the absence of gravity, what happens to the ball? <Jeopardy theme music playing>

In the absence of gravity or any other force the ball doesn’t move. It stays where it is (according to the Law of Inertia, or Newton’s First Law: an object will remain at rest or continue moving in a straight line at a constant speed unless acted upon by an external force.

Okay, now consider a larger experiment. The Earth orbits the Sun because of space-time being curved by the Sun, right? If we had access to a Star Trek like matter transporter and we “beamed” a round ball into a position stationary with regard to the Sun, what would happen to it? According to Einstein, it would not move because there would be no force acting upon it. Available paths, aka distorted space-time surfaces, to that ball may be myriad, but since it is not moving, it would take none of those.

According to Newton, it would move in a straight line directly into the Sun. According to Einstein, it would not move. Now, I ask you: would the ball move?

Postscript In a comment to a comment where I share this thought experiment, the commenter on my comment went on and on about how thee Sun was moving, along with the Milky Way Galaxy, rotating around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, moving as part of a supercluster, etc. Apparently the phrase “with regard to the Sun” was insufficient, so may I clarify that it was stationary relative to the Sun or that it moved along with the Sun, not just relative to it? Sheesh.

October 26, 2024

Do We Really Understand?

Filed under: Reason,Science — Steve Ruis @ 11:47 am
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A recent blog post by a popular astrophysicist stated the following:

We understand that:

•  our Universe is expanding,
•  that it can trace its history back to a hotter, denser, more uniform past,
•  with the earliest phases describable by a hot Big Bang,
•  which itself was preceded by a phase of cosmic inflation,
•  and that all that we see and experience today — stars, galaxies, planets, moons, the cosmic web, and even life itself — having arisen in the aftermath of these impressive events in our shared history.

I would have stated this differently. I would have started that: “According to our best current theory, (the Lambda cold dark matter, or the ΛCDM, model) . . . which states:. . . .”

If we really understand the topic, we should be able to explain all parts of this theory/model: namely “a phase of cosmic inflation,” dark matter, dark energy, expanding space-time, etc. which are all on the list of things we do not understand.

Even the commonly accepted concept such as space-time is iffy at best. Space is not a thing, so how can it expand? One excusigist explained that space-time could expand because it is a field. Okay, add another thing to the list of things not explained in this theory: a field.

The standard definition, which I first learned, is this: “In physics, a field is a region of space where every point is associated with a specific physical quantity, like a value or a vector.” In my day a field was a region in space in which something could be measured. As a consequence completely empty space is disqualified, except in the notion that there must be some mass nearby and the force of attraction to that mass must be able to be felt in that region of empty space, so in effect, all of space is a field of some sort, which gets us nowhere. A region in space in which an effect can be felt describes all space, so saying “space is a field” is nonsense, as the concept of space is needed to define a field. (A running joke in science is that “cows are out standing in their field” usually used to prick the balloon of another scientist who was described as being outstanding in his field.)

So, explaining that space-time could expand because it is a field is sheer nonsense, like cosmic inflation. Cosmic inflation, a period of rapid expansion of the universe . . . before the Big Bang, which is described as a rapid expansion of the universe (WTF?) is caused how? What triggered it? How does it work? For the ΛCDM model to be declared the “standard model” of the universe, you’d think such answers would be available. They are not. Oh, and the expansion occurred at speeds above the speed of light, something we think impossible now.

Physics, specifically astrophysics above, but also particle physics, high energy physics, etc. seem to have gone down rabbit holes. Einstein is partly to blame for this as he insisted that mathematics should be the leader in such endeavors, but mathematics has no bounds. In prior scientific endeavors, conceptualizations using imagination and logic, formed one branch and experimentation formed the other.

So experiments created data that required organization and conceptualizations. The conceptualizing, that is theorizing, created arrangements and structures that made sense of the data. The theories made predictions that lead to experiments being done, and experiments done created data that required theories to explain.

It seems as if physicists spend the vast majority of their time theorizing, usually mathematically, and almost no time in comparing theory and data. That is they have lost contact with reality.

Take the new tool, expected to create oodles of new data, the James Webb Space Telescope. By placing this telescope farther out than Earth orbit, in a Lagrange point, and then shielding it from any radiative heat source, allowed it to take infrared images deeper into space and therefore time than ever before. Note that is not “space-time” it is space and time because the light traveling from far away objects is limited to the speed of light, so the farther away a luminous object is, the longer the light has to travel and the longer it takes to get here and when it does, it was emitted long, long ago so wea re effectively seeing the past.

Since the time period the JWST was supposed to read was close to the time of the BB, the ΛCDM theorists predicted that galaxies would be very small, not evolved, Black holes would be few and far between, and star creation would be at a minimum. So, the JWST looked and saw large, evolved galaxies with Black holes at their centers, some being very, very massive black holes, and therefore “old,” and places in which star creation seemed to be moving at a high clip.

So, if the “current standard model” got things so very, very wrong, some doubt would be cast upon it, especially because of the long list if unexplained ad hoc patches already in place, no?

Well, of course, a small army of excusigists immediately lines up to explained that’s what they expected all along and that claims that the BBT has holes in it are vastly overstated. You see, if you only knew what they knew you would understand. These people seem to have morphed from honest scientists into Priests of the Standard Model.

But what do I know, that’s just what I can see from the cheap seats?

Addendum Regarding “. . . completely empty space is disqualified, except in the notion that there must be some mass nearby and the force of attraction to that mass must be able to be felt in that region of empty space . . .” Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity eliminates the concept of “the force of gravity” substituting curved space-time which means space theoretically could be completely empty and therefore not a field at all, at least with regard to gravity. Of course, there are huge magnetic fields all over the known universe, so maybe they can play the role of turning “empty space” into a “field.”

June 23, 2024

The Bizarreness of Space-Time

Filed under: Culture,Reason,Science — Steve Ruis @ 8:47 am
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I am not a fan of the concept of space-time, which will not surprise regular readers of this blog. Much of Einstein’s work is now coming into doubt for various and sundry reasons. And space-time is one concept I would love to see being done away with.

Okay, where to start? Let us start with the concept of space. Concepts about space were initially centered on locations. Primitive people wanted to know where to find drinkable water, prey to hunt, etc. Communications probably focused on paths, basically where to put your feet on a journey. (Some argue that tracking signs on those paths led to the development of language and possibly consciousness.) This was there, that was over there, a warm place in winter was far, far away that way, etc.

As we became more intellectual we characterized space with organizing schemes with directions, units of distance, directions such as “keep the Sun at your back,” and “head toward that mountain,” etc. Math students are familiar with the Cartesian coordinate system, a framework for mapping three dimensional space. We also have the system of latitude and longitude to grid out locations on the surface of the earth. All such systems, however, have to be pegged down somehow. We have the prime meridian, for example, and the equator, and the north and south poles all of which are arbitrarily placed. Even the Cartesian coordinate system has an origin, which must be placed in a fixed position with the three axes then placed into fixed orientations to be able to be used to locate things.

I think you can see that space is not a thing. It has no grounding in nature. Sure we can talk about how we need to add onto our houses because we “need more space,” or Hitler went to war so as to have control over lebensraum, basically space in which Germans could live and grow crops, etc. talking about space as if it were a real thing, but it is not.

So, when Einstein embraced the idea that space could expand it was basically bizarre to most of the other physicists at the time. It was not without some logic. Gravity, unlike all of the other forces in nature, didn’t seem to have a medium and also seemed to act instantaneously. Having objects that move by moving along distorted lines of space solved a number of problems, but created an even greater number (most of which have been swept under various rugs).

How is it that masses (not volumes) of matter can distort space, warp it in fact? If a moving asteroid approaches Earth it follows the “grid” of distorted space-time, and follows a curved path toward the Earth as if the Earth were attracting it. But why do such objects always follow those grid lines down, rather than away from the masses causing the distortion? This “gravity is due to spatial distortion” idea is incomplete.

And then we have time, something we still struggle to define. Basically it was a measure of duration. We say things like “I was sick for three days.” That gives your listener an idea of how long you suffered. But is time a “thing?” Can it be expanded or contracted? Subjectively we feel time is quite capricious in how it seems to pass in our experience. But instruments we have devised to track durations, clocks, watches, etc., seem to tick along consistently showing no such variations. It seems like time can be subjective or objective.

But is time a dimension? The definition of the term dimension includes “a measurable extent of some kind, such as length, breadth, depth, or height.” So, time can be considered to be a dimension and we often create graphs showing how things change over time. But this is merely for our convenience and edification, it does not establish that the dimension of time is a physical thing, certainly not one that can expand or contract.

And the creation of space-time? The three spatial dimensions are linked together through the simple fact that all physical objects are three dimensional, Guy Fieri’s joke about “meat sliced so thin it only has one side” aside. But time is a measure of duration and this might be linked to an object (like a rain drop that evaporates) but linked to other non-time dimensions? On what basis? Is there a ratio linking the two, e.g. how many parts of space are equivalent to one part of time, etc.

So, space (not a thing) is linked to time (not a thing) and it is expanding because . . . because. . . .

People are not told inconvenient details, for example according to current theory space-time is expanding, but only between the galaxies, not within them. Then the explanation of “expanding space-time” does not include a reason for this being even possible, possibly due to a reliance on the General Theory of Relativity of Einstein being a largely mathematical construct and not a conceptual one. Other theories do account for this but those theories are “out of fashion,” I guess would be the term.

And the BBT theory is linked to a particular aspect of GRT, that being that space is inherently “empty.” Photons of light are traveling to us though empty space and since they are red-shifted, their wavelengths must be lengthening because space-time is stretching. No explanation is given why objects in space would be stretched as space containing them was being stretched, of course.

There is more than one fly in this ointment. For example, the physics community was convinced BE (before Einstein) that space wasn’t empty, that it was filled by what was called the “luminiferous aether” or just aether for short. The existence of this was hypothesized as being the medium through which light traveled through otherwise empty space.

There was an experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, which was an attempt to measure the motion of the Earth through that aether and it came up with a near null result and so some concluded from that that the aether didn’t exist, but that is not what that experiment showed. This was one of those situations in which scientists get their exercise by jumping to conclusions. All kinds of interpretations were possible and eventually experiments done at different altitudes produced different results, thus supporting the existence of an aether. Also, a simple reason that the M-M experiment got near null results is that the Earth might be dragging the aether along with it as it rotated in space and revolved around the Sun. After all the Earth drags its atmosphere around with it.

If there is indeed an aether, then the light from distant galaxies would not be traveling through a vacuum but through a medium and light always loses energy when traveling through a medium. Since it cannot slow down, the loss of energy would show up as a frequency shift downward/wavelength shift upward (toward the red end of the spectrum). And the longer it traveled, the more energy it would lose and the more red-shifted it would become.

Oh, and by the way, later in his career, Einstein switched back to the position that there was an aether after all, even though it made quite some bits of this theories obsolete.

Books have been written explaining physics with an aether included. Studies are still being done. More than a few of the weirdnesses of modern physics get explained very simply through these alternative theories without getting into theoretical dead ends like dark energy, dark matter, cosmic inflation. But because they are “out of fashion” the best minds aren’t focused upon them, which we really would need to create better progress.

Stay tuned.

January 15, 2023

Space-time

Filed under: Science — Steve Ruis @ 11:33 am
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On Quora currently one Quoran asked the question “Is time a dimension, or are all dimensions spatial only?” This has been on my mind lately.

I start with a definition of a “dimension”:

Dimension a measurable extent of some kind, such as length, breadth, depth, or height.

When I was much younger I found statements like “there are only three dimensions” or “only four dimensions” to be laughable. Even my little pea-brain knew that to be false. For example, consider a small particle hanging in space and you want to describe it as exactly as you can. As to its position, you can use three spatial measurements to describe its position, but only with regard to some other location. We can “time stamp” those spatial measurements so that we have an idea when in time we are making those measurements. So, we have hit “four dimensions.” Is that all there are? Hardly. What color is that particle? What is its temperature? What is its mass? What is its volume? What is its density? Electrical conductivity? Opacity?

All measurements are comparisons with other things, for each major type we set “standards of comparison” or just “standards” for short. For lengths, we set meters as one standard; for mass: grams and kilograms, slugs, etc. For temperature, Kelvins and . . . and. . . .

For the “spatial dimensions” we are actually measuring lengths in three orthogonal directions, that is at right angles to one another. Since three measurements at right angles to one another establishes a position, we say that space is “three dimensional” . . . spatially! A consequence is we can establish the position of any object with just three measurements (these can be angles as well as linear lengths).

It is Einstein who invented space-time as a four dimension aspect of space that he used to “explain” gravity. (Newton never got around to finding a cause of that force; he just described its behavior.) To explain is to make clear and in Einstein’s gravity, this is clear as mud. According to Einstein, gravity is a distortion of space-time created by masses embedded within it. What most people gloss over is that if this interpretation is correct, space-time cannot be just a set of measurement directions and types of measurements, it must be a real “thing” in order to interact with masses.

I now notice that space-time is being considered as the medium for electromagnetic waves and “quantum field waves” that are what subatomic particles “really” consist of. You may remember the search for the ether (also spelled aether), the medium that supports light waves even traveling through a vacuum. Experiments found it hard to find, to the point that most felt that there was no such thing. But now, space-time is being promoted as the “New Ether,” the medium for electromagnetic waves and more!

I am not a formally trained physicist, per se, but I took a minor in physics along with my major in chemistry in undergraduate school. I am a duffer at best when it comes to more modern, complex physics. But I am seeing more and more things that we considered to be mental constructs when I was in college (1960s-1970’s) being concretized. We talked even then about the “collapse” of atomic wave functions. But we understood that the wave functions were like what sine wave drawings were to sound waves. They represented some aspect of the wave-like behavior but were not real things. What collapsed when a “wave function collapsed” was our uncertainty about the state of a system, there was no physical collapse involved.

Now I read people talking about wave functions as if they were real things, not just mental constructs. You should know that when you mathematically square an atomic electron wave function you get a probability distribution, so a wave function is the square root of a probability distribution. How real is that? (Hint: not.)

So, now, the dubious mental construct of space-time is becoming “real” in much the same way. Seriously, it seems we have gotten way too far out over our skis. Speculations need to be printed in a different font or color or something to distinguish conjectures from real measurements.

And maybe we need to spend some time defining what “real” means in physics.

Addendum At the same time we are concretizing space-time, we are arguing that time does not exist as a dimension. Clearly there are conflicts here that need to be weeded out.

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