Why time is not an illusion

Blog 20151230 Why time is not an illusion

When I ask folks what time is, I generally get one or two of these:

1.     Time is a dimension.

2.     Time is a measurement.

3.     Time is an illusion

Readers know, of course, that time is motion (the title of one of my most popular Blogs). The upshot is that almost no one else knows what time is. I understand why regressive physicists consider time to be a dimension—they could not be hired if they thought otherwise. Without it, relativity and Big Bang Theory would suffer an early death. The solipsism embodied in the second definition is common, and well-preserved in positivism and operationalism. My response to those who think time is a measurement is this: The dinosaurs experienced time, even though they were incapable of measuring  it.

I was always intrigued by the silly statement that “time is an illusion.” This is the definition of “illusion”: “a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses.” Growing up, I used to do some simple magic tricks that clearly were illusions. Nonetheless, I am under no illusion that a great deal of time (motion) has occurred since. The silver hair tells me as much. Then I got this anonymous comment giving me a clue to what was up:

“as time is illusion, cause and effect do not exist. Our concepts about time and cause and effect are deeply erronously."

Despite the misspelling, the comment clearly shows the necessary connection with indeterminism. As determinists, we assume that there are material causes for all effects. Of course, anonymous is correct to a certain degree: cause and effect do not exist, they occur, as described by Newton's Second Law of Motion. On the other hand, hardly anyone denies causality for some events. Even if you lived in a basket, it would be impossible to deny that eating food (a cause) might produce an effect (continued life). This all goes to show how the radical adherence to logic based on indeterministic assumptions leads to nonsense. Thenceforth, we can consider the statement “time is an illusion” to be pure indeterminism. And like all indeterminism, we can disregard it as psychobabble handed down to thwart the advance of the scientific worldview.

Infinity and the god of the gaps

Blog 20151223 Infinity and the god of the gaps

The march of science continues apace, ever pushing indeterminism into the dustbin of history. Traditional philosophy, developed during the feudal period, required frequent modifications as the outside world rushed in with its contradictory facts. Each ferment resulted in a philosophical split between conservatives and liberals. Fundamentalists persevered in cloisters and rural areas hidden from the radically opposed proclamations of science. Urban dwellers, forced to confront those new ideas about the external world, prepared the reforms, becoming religious moderates, if not agnostics and atheists.

We all need to get along to survive. Compromises were handed out all around. While evolution could be denied by fundamentalists, it had to be accepted by moderates who had to deal closely with it. Scientific and religious liberals agreed that the mechanism of evolution was neo-Darwinism, the proposition that genes and natural selection were required for evolution. The compromise eventually brought acceptance even by the Pope. Of course, readers know that the real, universal  mechanism of evolution is univironmental determinism (UD), the fact that what happens to a portion of the universe is equally dependent on the infinite matter in motion within and without.

Now to the “god of the gaps”… Readers also should know the Third Assumption of Science, uncertainty (It is impossible to know everything about anything, but it is possible to know more about anything). Stemming from our assumption of infinity, we realize that there always will be a gap in our scientific knowledge. As in the neo-Darwinism example above, this gap enables indeterminists to hypothesize immaterial “causes” for effects not currently explained by science. So, when cosmogony (cosmology based on the assumption that the universe had a beginning ) is finally defeated, we will be left with an infinite universe in which there will be an infinite number of facts and explanations still to be engendered. The fact that we can never eliminate this inevitable gap means that uneducated indeterminists are forever free to hypothesize a god, however tiny, to fit the resulting gap. Thus, while Infinite Universe Theory will apply yet another blow to indeterminism, it will not be decisive. As is well-known, there is a sucker (baby) born every second. Babies are born as neutral combatants in the determinism-indeterminism conflict. They slowly become determinists as they interact with the macrocosm (external world), becoming educated to its neomechanistic ways. To the degree that this education remains insufficient, they will be imbued with indeterministic assumptions that harken back to feudalistic times.

Many of the motivations for the “god of the gaps” argument are standard theology:

1.    A god provides, not only an explanation for things and events, it gives purpose to life. Thus, the purpose of a bird’s nest is to raise its young. Humans build homes for the same purpose. They also follow religious edicts to build communal homes on Earth and to prepare for a home in an imagined heaven.

2.   The realization that we will never know everything is as humbling as the universe is large. This necessary humility may be used by indeterminists to rightly confront classical mechanism, which was based on finite universal causality (the assumption that there could be a finite number of mechanical causes for an effect).

3.    Indeterminists have great difficulty understanding the phenomena they attribute to “spirituality.” This is because they do not adhere to the Fourth Assumption of Science, inseparability (Just as there is no motion without matter, so there is no matter without motion). Thus, when a person dies, indeterminists see the motionless body as devoid of the “spirit,” which has magically left for parts unknown. This particular form of the “god of the gaps” may be seen in regressive physics wherever matterless motion is claimed. Einstein’s “immaterial gravitational and magnetic fields” are classic examples.

4.    Indeterministic lessons held for long periods do not suddenly evaporate. Being forever in retreat, religion grasps onto any gap in knowledge in its attempts to survive. That is why coincidences play a significant part in such belief systems. We will never discover all the factors involved in a particular coincidence, often placing us in awe of the result. Survivors may ascribe supernatural powers to their coincidental success, while victims can say nothing about their coincidental demise.

5.    At this time, the premier gap argument involves relativity and Big Bang Theory. Just as Einstein’s immaterial fields have no material causes, the Big Bang has no material cause. These regressions in physical theory leave a huge, desperate gap into which indeterminists are free to insert their favorite gods. The removal of that gap will be a great achievement, even though we know that the “god of the gaps” will never die.  

The cause of glaciations

Blog 20151216 The cause of glaciations

Earth has been subject to warming and cooling periods for the last 2 million years. Glacial-interglacial cycles were first thought to be associated with volcanism. Large eruptions of stratovolcanoes eject tremendous quantities of volcanic ash and sulfuric acid into the jet stream, blocking out the Sun and cooling the globe. For instance, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines reduced global temperatures by 0.5 ^oC between 1991 and 1993. The cycles were quite regular, but there was no well-known reason for volcanism to have cyclic behavior.

The emphasis on volcanism waned with the advent of a theory proposed by Milankovitch in 1930. This theory depended on what I call POE (precession, obliquity, and eccentricity), which yielded astronomical cycles of about 20,000, 40,000, and 100,000 years. Precession describes the wobble of Earth’s axis over time. Obliquity is the tilt of Earth’s axis (23.3+2.4^o) with respect to the plane of its orbit. Eccentricity describes Earth’s almost, but non-circular orbit around the Sun. The theory had a rough start, but has been increasingly accepted as the mechanism for glacial cycles. Unfortunately, the main problem is that the theory, despite its long history, has not been properly validated, as we show in our most recent paper:

Puetz, Stephen J., Prokoph, Andreas, and Borchardt, Glenn, 2016, Evaluating alternatives to the Milankovitch theory: Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, v. 170, p. 158–165. [doi:10.1016/j.jspi.2015.10.006], which is already available for download at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378375815001901

Highlights

• Orbital tuning removes spectral power from non-Milankovitch frequencies.

• Orbital tuning inhibits testing of alternatives to the Milankovitch theory.

• Reporting bias occurs by publishing positive results while hiding negative results.

• Spectral analysis of orbitally tuned time-series involves circular reasoning.

• Choices about how to orbitally tune records also results in altered cyclicity.

Abstract

The physical process that causes cycles in Earth’s precession, obliquity, and eccentricity is well established, and researchers have detected and modeled the orbital cycles for millions of years into the past. The Milankovitch theory postulates that Earth’s orbital cycles contribute to similar periodicity in climatic variation — with the periods of the climatic cycles primarily ranging from 19,000 years to 1,200,000 years. Even while support for the Milankovitch Theory remains strong, opposition to the process of tuning sedimentary records to Milankovitch models has become increasingly vocal. Here, we discuss another negative aspect of orbital tuning that has been ignored to this point. Specifically, orbital tuning contributes to a type of negative analytical bias against research aimed at modifying the Milankovitch theory as well as bias against testing alternatives to the Milankovitch theory, such as the Universal cycle model, presented in this work.

In essence, most investigators have been using the theory to test the theory, which normally is a no-no in science. Our analyses of the raw data do not confirm the POE speculations, although many of our UWS cycles, developed from raw data, are close to those of Milankovitch. We don't really know the cause of the cycles either, but think that it has something to do with aether pressures that vary systematically throughout the universe.

Absurd Spacetime Concept Leads To Wasting Scientific Resources

Blog 20151209 Absurd Spacetime Concept Leads To Wasting Scientific Resources

By George Coyne

 

Not only do regressive physicists maintain that it is impossible for the universe to exist, they also are convinced that quantum particles “can exist simultaneously in two or more places.” How incredibly weird is that? Does this make any logical or rational sense to anyone other than true believers of the standard QM Copenhagen model? To me it seems profoundly unscientific. These physicists try to deflect any attention from the absurdity of their belief systems by confidently claiming that the universe is very weird. Does anyone think that they would try the same tactic in a court of law if charged with a crime that they had committed? Would they tell the jury that they accepted that their alibi was completely implausible and totally impossible, but nevertheless it is valid and should be believed? Would they argue that it is just due to the nature of the universe that makes it seem that they are guilty when in reality they are innocent? They would only try such a tactic if they were attempting to make a case for an insanity plea.

As a result of the misguided belief in spacetime, there arises the concept of gravity waves which have never been detected despite a great deal of wasted resources in this search. The erroneous claim on March 17, 2014 by astronomers at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that "they had detected and produced the first direct image of gravitational waves across the primordial sky" was later disproved. By January 30, 2015 a news item in Nature stated "Gravitational waves discovery now officially dead."

On the night of December 2, 2015 the European Space agency launched LISA on a mission to make test measurements for a method that will be employed to detect “gravitational waves.” These waves, according to Einstein's predictions, are “ripples in spacetime.” But since spacetime is only imaginary, it does not actually exist, and thus it cannot have ripples.

Glenn Borchardt's neomechanical explanation of gravity as being "produced by variations in aether pressure” is logical and rational. It has the great advantage over the relativity model in that it does not require the irrational concept of spacetime and is consistent with Newton's classical mechanics.