August 2003 Archives

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$$. :)