Hong’s Cave

A couple of days ago, I found an interesting article on a 27-year-old New Zealand broadcasting school tutor whose recent paper on time seems to have caused controversy in some part of the Physics community.

Peter Lynds‘ paper “Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics:
Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity”, which is to be published in August in Foundations of Physics Letters, claims that there is no such thing as a static instant time and that the time can be only measured as an interval rising from the motions in space.

It seems there has been some “buzz” going on because it received such a spotlight in the mass media (or on the ‘Net). There have been many rebuttals pointing out some of the paper’s (potential?) fallacies. I am not much of a physics or a mathematics person, so it’s hard for me to determine by reading the paper, but I can, at least, tell that the paper isn’t much of a mathematical one, but more of a philosophical one.

Anyway, for me, some of the concepts described were interesting regardless of the paper’s validity. Especially, how we define “time”. Unlike other spatial dimensions, time seems to move only in one direction, varying only in relative rates of change. Maybe, time is not as independent as other dimensions and is only defined by changes in the spatial space. Or I am just speaking out of my a$$.

[Updated 2003-08-14] There is an interview with Mr. Lynds at Space.com.

As for the “(no) flow of time”… I don’t know why they say it’s hard to understand the Lynds’ ideas. Maybe it’s because I am not a physicist, but to me, it seems like how one defines motion and time, although I can’t say I have a total understanding.

The traditional approach is that we define motion with succession of singular time. On the other hand, the Lynds’ idea (it seems to me) is that the time is defined by motion.

A thought that just occurred. If we can take a snapshot of the world, which has a ball, at a singular moment, can we tell if the ball was moving or not? I don’t think we can. The motion cannot be defined with a “static instant time”. I think this is kind of a paradox similar to the Zeno’s since there is motion or no motion.

If one mentions momentum, electromagnetic properties, etc. to disagree, I’d say those are extra dimensional properties outside the space-time (i.e., those that can’t be described with the space-time coordinates). I am not sure even those can be measured when the time is “frozen” (i.e., those might also be defined by the time interval).

Anyway, I like the idea of defining time defined by the changes in other “physical” properties instead of infinite time slices. This is as unsatisfying as defining a plane with infinite slices of thickness-less lines. (Yes, and I am currently reading Flatland, too.)