Timeless Explanation: A New Kind of Causality, Julian Barbour

There are serious indications from attempts to create a quantum theory of gravity that time must disappear completely from the description of the quantum universe. This has been known since 1967, when DeWitt discovered the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. I shall argue that this forces us to conceive explanation and causality in an entirely new way. The present can no longer be understood as the consequence of the past. Instead, I shall suggest that one may have to distinguish possible presents on the basis of their intrinsic structure, not on the basis of an assumed temporal ordering. If correct, this could have far-reaching implications. Hitherto, because the present has always been interpreted as the lawful consequence of the past, science has made no attempt to answer 'Why' questions, only 'How' questions. But if there is no past in the traditional sense, we must consider things differently. Thus, if we eliminate time, we may even be able to start asking "Why" questions.

***

Specification of a point and tangent vector in conformal superspace (CS) determines a slab of spacetime in CMC foliation and unique curve in CS.
Almost perfect implementation of Mach's principle because local inertial frames, local proper distance and local proper time all emergent and determined by the universe's shape and shape velocity.
The Mystery: Shape velocity, as opposed to shape direction, is last vestige of Newton's absolute space and time. Responsible for expansion of the universe and perhaps perfect transformation theory in quantum theory of the universe.

This lecture was delivered on the 16th Kraków Methodological Conference "The Causal Universe", May 17-18, 2012.
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[JohnVKaravitis]

I'm not 8 minutes into this lecture and I'm blown away! Great speaker, knowledgeable, energetic, passionate. Just great!

[blakesr.]

18:00...by the way, what time should I stop this talk? lol, wonderful!

[trudytrew]

Barbour is very enthusiastic, so the signs are that he may really be on to something. However, I think you need to be familiar with his work already to make much sense of this admittedly spirited and engaging presentation.

Like other thinkers, Julian makes liberal use of the term "distance" as though we are readily to understand what he means by this; but what is distance exactly, and how can we be sure that it is a genuinely primitive notion, as he seems to suppose? The term may simply refer to a commonsense fiction - expedient, of course, in our everyday lives, but otherwise fundamentally untrue. How might we explain the idea of distance (as a primitive) without recourse to circularity?

[OneWrongFamily]

The methodology of a speculative temporal philosophy

With the scientific development pointing into a certain direction across various disciplines, that time could only be an illusion, accompanied by a societal consensus vis-a-vis this conception, i decided to try and concept a new view on the philosphy of timelessness.

Asking yourself anything, being the main tool of all of philosphy, the questions that are being stated by a philosophy of timelessness are going to represent the core of this treatment. For some of them, first approaches are going to be delivered, which are to be executed at another point. This way, a first conception of this philosophy is to be proposed, and the foundation of the methodological framework for further considerations to be layed down.

The first obstacle to be overcome is the language. Besides others, the first ones to encounter some difficulties are the ones who try to define the nature of timelessness using a language which fundamental structure depends on the temporal order of being things.

Considering this, all expressions that are to be viewed on the background of timelessness, will be accompanied by a corresponding reference or a new term will be introduced.

The understanding of those terms, demands a high level of cognitive devotion to the following premise:

Time does only exist as a mental construct.

Regarding the previously stated warning, it is the language that creates a mental contradiction by speaking these words.

But since time cant be eliminated on a cognitive level, it is not yet necessary to predict an attack on the day to day semiotics.

But since we just eliminated time from a physical level, some of the rather intuitiv answers to simple questions seem not to be applicable anymore and other previously not even thought of questions seem to be pressing for an elegant solution.

Imagine a physical world without time, a consortium of from one another least possibly different nows, only connected through the laws of nature.

Every one of those nows would be equal in the face of timelessness and all of them would be happening simultaneously.

But there are nows, that include time, and it are those ones which include intelligent life itself.

Since intelligent life has to be made possible by selfawareness, and it itself needs a concept of a past and future self, u cant speak of single nows but rather a now complex.

Since there is no temporal Order of things, common physical equations have to be translated into the language of temporal philosophy as seen below:

A system moving at the speed v changes its state at a rate lower by a facotr of (1 − v2/c2)−1/2

than the system in the rest frame, meaning that every human life( if and as long as it has a concept of time )represents such a now complex, in which time is to be found, but only within the boundaries of the associated mind.

If the human consciousness moves in time, but the corresponding body itself does not, the conclusion is to be drawn, that at smaller mergers of nows within the human now complex, there are separate consciousnesses feeling the journey through time.

Therefore it has to be calculable how many of those conscious states a human now complex includes and therefore how often one appears in his own life.

The respective subject is then limited by time, constructed of almost innurable states of consciousness, all regarding themselves as the real present one, for eternity.

To put it in simpler terms: Your life is like a book, with the pages torn out and distributed on the floor. Every single page does exist equally next to the other, for ever.

Death can be defined as the first now of human now complex, from which on all following nows of that complex are not able to simulate the associated consciousness in relation to all other systems of the universe. This topic will be further discussed in the chapter devoted to the language analytics of the temporal Philosophy.

Going further into the book metaphor, you have a Universe consisting of several books, one them you, and the rate at which you read one book in relation to another is only determined by gravity and speed, the direction in which it is read by the laws of thermodynamics, the physical foundation will be specified at a given time. You should have a clearer pictures now, about the fundamental laws that determine this philosophy and to not stretch this introduction unnecessary i am now going to state the various forms of life that will be at the center of this philosophy.

It is defined by its relation to time and its perception and the practical part of this philosophy will be devoted to finding a series of demands u can set for interactions with the different kinds of life.

It will take some effort and will be discussed in different parts of this treatment but we will be able to split life into 4 categories:

unaware life
Aware life
Selfaware life
Selfaware life aware of timelessnes
Intuitivly less accessible and harder to visualize is going the be the approach to put a moral value on certain action, since the calculation will be determined by variable views on time, simply because life of every categories includes certain aspects of the previous categories and you will have to consider all possible angles on time before even trying on depicting a normative ethics of timelessness.

For the introduction into the temporal philosophy it will be enough to have a basic understanding of classical physics, thermodynamics and relativity. Quantummechanics will be introduced at a later stage to help us save the problem of the eternal return and derive the free will.

The speculative nature of this philosophy lays within the fact, that there is no scientific prove of its premise at the time this is being written and it therefore does not claim any sort of legitimation or applicability in the present moment.

I do think however, that a willing reader will have to accept the fact that a lot of things would have to change in human interaction if this premise is proven at a certain point and in the cultural evolution of every temporal philosophy it will be stated why a civilization is only able to conduct this thought process at a certain point of its development and even later will be able to accept its conclusions .

Aim of the methodology of the speculative temporal philosophy shall be: to present a perhaps purely biological distinction between the various layers of life made possible through a metaphysical framework in concurrence with and through current physical theories, along with the existing parameters respective to the aforementioned metaphysics study, as a basis for my chief work.

[rexdrabble]

He is wrong about triangles, one side of each is the same in over lap.
Also one point of each can be set at that exact same place
So, you only have two points to examine

[rkpetry]

Three particles—? Or three points—! Particles have size and attendent field waves, spacetime coordination 'contortion' and deBroglie mass-energy waves if they're moving where the speed of light is finite, etc....

[tnekkc]

Is it too high tech to tap into the PA system to bypass room reverb?

[nunomaroco]

Hi there if it help, I think that Tjarda Boekholt team already solved 3 body problem in black holes, time irreversible. ....all the best.

[KipIngram]

This is fascinating and I feel like it just has to be onto something. Just some basic "musing" about how a one-object universe makes it seem completely clear that Mach was on the right track. Inertia, linear and angular, seem unavoidably tied to the global mass distribution. And as far as I know we just don't know how this works. We take inertial density just as a given for each material.

[Sniiigel]

So time and causality emerges from there being a lot (a LOT!) of nearly identical states, creating the appearance of evolving states?

[robkelly]

Does JB believe there is direction and order in the universe or that it is random and chaotic?

[Lightning_Lance]

"And there you have it; time does not exist. By the way, what time should I stop this talk?"

[maroneill]

When the speaker is explaining slides, we get to see him standing, with the slide in the background, unreadable. Full screen slides when they're being explained PLEASE.

[Zeuts]

over my head.  I understood the first 20 minutes, and then he started mentioning "geodysics" and whatnot and my mind went blank.

[paulebert]

2:00 This is puzzeling me .. "Suppose we have n points fixed in 3 dimensional space ... We measure the distances between the n points...we get n^2 seperations .... it's percicly n into n-1 divided by 2...it's or order n^2."

Why would it be this result? From my point of view it should be (n into 2) which is a combination without counting same distances twice. For 3 points you get 3 distances using my formula. Using his you get 1.5?

Did someone spot my mistake because i would not expact this man to do such mistakes ^^

[KipIngram]

An important part of what he's doing is breaking "change" down into categories: 1) changes that correspond to rigid body translation, 2) changes that correspond to rigid body rotation, and 3) change that corresponds to changes in shape. He argues that if you're working with the entire universe (as opposed to a subsystem), then categories 1 and 2 are meaningless, and category 3 is all that's "real." So category 3 represents horizontal shift in that 3D picture he showed earlier, while categories 1 and 2 represent vertical motion along the "fiber." Categories 1 and 2 are pure gauge transformation.

[keystothebox]

I believe there would be an 11th dimension or real objects that would be the ratio matter to energy, but I agree on the premise of the 10 other dimensions.

[EnginAtik]

Angles do not help me find the natural frequency of a spring-mass system or a capacitor and an inductor in parallel. Small delta lambda or small delta t, emergent or not, there seems to be other fundamental things alongside geometry that need to be measured and quantified. Nobody is arguing against the beauty in variational formulation; Whether a continuous or discrete formulation is a better fit is not the concern either. If Galileo was one of the listeners, he wouldn't have understood the Lie groups involved but I suspect he would have had a problem with the message in the lecture, not with the mathematical rigor.

Two identical clocks tick similarly. If we observe that they don't under certain conditions we need to observe the external conditions that cause this; the emphasis is on observation.

If your friend's watch falls back 5 minutes a day and you synchronize your watches and agree to meet tomorrow at the same time, he or she will be 5 minutes late. If you were to decide to meet the day after tomorrow instead, he or she will be 10 minutes late. We integrate over your "time" to reach this conclusion. We could have used the earth's rotation angle as the integration variable to arrive at the same conclusion if your watch keeps in synch with earths rotation. Time being an emergent quantity means nothing more that this.

If there was only the sun, the moon and the earth in the whole universe, our lives would pretty much be the same and with a definite answer of what an inertial reference frame is. This would have also meant that angular momentum of the universe would be non-zero; a concept hard to understand even in this simple universe. Three body system is difficult for humans to solve with the mathematical tools available to us; celestial bodies do not seem to have a problem following the trajectories prescribed by the solution. The difficulty in three-body-problem is a technical one and not related to existence or non-existence of inertial reference frames.

Skewing and dilation can naturally be added to represent a transformation. But my brain hurts thinking about whether we can construct elasticity tensors involved with deformations of such triangles and whether forces involved can also be superimposed similarly.


I enjoyed this lecture a great deal. For some reason or another people of geometry created number of taboos in the history of science and it makes me fidgety wondering if supremacy of geometry is being defended in lectures on such topics.

[emmabradford]

"It's just like heaven, being here with you. You're like a genie, too good to be true. Cause after all Dear, I love you, I do. Angle-Baby, my Angle-Baby..."

[vicachcoup]

I think you have to copy your post, delete in, then paste your previous chat back into a new Reply text box.
Edit before posting.
I've not seen an edit feature on YT.