Abstract
Now that we’ve sketched the basic outline of our story, and built some common ground to stand on, it’s time to start the main treatment and start looking at some concrete examples of how laws and descriptors are more complicated than they may appear at first glance. First thing to know is that everything discussed from here until chapter 5 will be in the context of a frozen, instantaneous picture of the universe. In the way of a small recap, so far we have stated that the instantaneous past, which we could also call the freeze-frame version of the past, is physically located at some distance far away from us. The increasingly precise, or the increasingly instantaneous, present is located at the center of each act of measurement, and we, or you could say everything else, lie somewhere in between.
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Notes
- 1.
Particularly in the extreme case of the infinitely instantaneous.
- 2.
Even if it requires some version of spooky action at a distance.
- 3.
Either mathematically, or via simple observation and measurement.
- 4.
Also, note that this starts to look exactly like quantum mechanics if you allow for lots of branches in your possible causally determinate moments between measurements, which is what the freezing and unfreezing parts correspond to. We’re gonna come back to this and many other examples, but if you’re seeing this, you’re seeing the heart of how modern scientists are reforming their views of how things work.
- 5.
Actually, there are several versions of this thought experiment. I could as easily have called it John Locke’s sock, or George Washington’s axe , or Jeannot’s knife etc.
- 6.
In case you think I’m exaggerating here, just be informed that there are very well respected physical chemists happily carrying the torch for arguing that the classical description of electric fields and their effects on atomic movements should hold all the way down to the nano-scales, especially in certain biological systems, and it is a matter of ongoing debate whether mathematics is capable of treating phenomena like this which reach across several space scales in small amounts of time.
- 7.
Just a note, however, even if this is how I’m using the term local in this book, the term non-local is reserved for some subtle things in physics and we have to be careful about when and where we use it. Generally, it’s reserved for events which are proven to be neither correlated nor anti-correlated with events that should have caused those things, which has led to the popular notion that non-local things are “faster-than-light”. I have some issues with this interpretation, mostly because the majority of us don’t have a deep enough notion of light to evaluate a claim like that. For this reason I’m going to mostly stay away from the local vs non-local terminology in this text, but the way I’m defining field-like properties has to do with assigning labels to things which happen across time and space as opposed to just space.
- 8.
And later you realize that even though you aren’t causing the correlation to happen, it will always happen anyway because it turns out that no matter how clever you are, you will not be able to devise a way of pulling or pushing on the object that doesn’t correlate with the ceiling also moving. That is what the universe requires in order to push or pull this particular object, but the reasons are only apparent in the end limits of observations, like a horizon or a rainbow.
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Bascom, G. (2017). Narrative Time. In: On the Inside of a Marble. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60690-3_2
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